I am making a game about birds and time.

It’s free to play, and the aim of the game is to cherish the dawn chorus

The aim of the game is to listen to bird song and guess which bird is singing. The game goes back and forward in time, imagining the birds you might hear in the city of Bath way back before the Romans arrived, and into a hopeful future where birds are abundant once more.

There are different eras in different locations to try in this game…

Dawn Chorus Quest – Birdsong of Bath’s past and future

Winner of best app at Bath Digital Festival buildathon

I use Green PT (a European based version of chat GPT that runs on renewable energy) to help me turn my narrative ideas, sketches and notes into plans and research that specify the game development prompts. I then feed these computer assisted prompts into a tool called Lovable, that builds the app for me. I then extract the codebase from lovable, and feed it into green PT for code review and bug fixing, and iterate towards a better game. I learned how to do this at the Bath Digital Festival ‘buildathon’ where I got 100 free credits to use, and made the first demo of Dawn Chorus Quest.

The game won ‘best app’ at the festival, and the prize was ‘vouchers of my choice.’ I chose another 100 credits for the app, and developed a more shiny version of the game.

Since then I have become slightly obsessed, and I enjoy making the game so much that I spent about £80 of my OWN MONEY buying credits to continue making the game. It’s a hobby I suppose!

Three kg CO₂e – a carbon cost equivalent to a 15 mile drive

The carbon cost of using AI to make a game has been relatively small – I’ve been chatting with my lovely husband about the irony of ‘boiling the oceans with AI’ to make a game about avian biodiversity and shifting baseline. However, the Green PT platform is where the biggest chunk of ‘thinking energy’ is expended, and this is all running on renewable sources. Once GreenPT has done the big brain stuff, and set up a really good series of prompts, they go to lovable. Lovable is more ‘carbon intensive’ computing power, so its best to be efficient with the prompts on that platform to keep the carbon costs down.

The estimated carbon cost of building the game so far is approximately 3 kilograms of CO₂e, helped by the fact that GreenPT runs on renewable energy in European data centers.

How it started.

The disappearing dawn chorus

In May and June 2026, and particularly since International Dawn Chorus day, I was thinking about the “shifting baseline.”

I hate the idea that we will forget how much the natural world has changed.

I think I can remember how the dawn chorus sounded in the 1980s when I was a child. I think I have an instinctive awareness that there is something important missing now. I wonder if today’s children will sense what they are missing from the dawn chorus in 50 years time.

To play around with this idea, I went to the Bath Digital Festival buildathon, and made a game called Dawn Chorus Quest.

Play dawn chorus quest here https://dawn-chorus-quest.lovable.app

It’s a listening game that lets you hear and see visualisations of bird song, experience the abundance of the past, and explore how the future might sound. I used my own recording of the dawn chorus, along with open source data from bird enthusiasts.

The game was inspired by Douglas Adams ‘Last Chance to See,’ and Lucio Arese bird song visualisations.

It was a marvellous journey turning data into a game that I hope shares the joy of birdsong.

I’d love for you to play it, listen, and perhaps learn a bit more about British birds.

The game also shows what the future might sound like, with more or less bird song.

Play Dawn Chorus Quest here: https://dawn-chorus-quest.lovable.app/

If you do play and spot any bugs or have any comments, please drop them here or into the feedback form.

Feedback form
https://forms.gle/qC4FLQxwPBfAweW69

Update: June 2026

About a month after making the game it’s had 220 players so far, and I know of one lovely couple who have completed the game. Some one in a bird data team that I shared it with said it is “fantastic to see and very cool” which pleased me greatly.

More info about bird song guessing game dawn chorus quest.

Jen xx