Building Orquest at SharkByte: Turning Career Planning Into an AI-Powered Game 🦈🎮
How It Started
This weekend, my team and I participated in SharkByte Hackathon, where we challenged ourselves to build something that could actually help students.
One problem we kept thinking about was career planning. As students, we're constantly making decisions about classes, degrees, and our future, but sometimes we don't even know what career we want to pursue.
So we asked ourselves a question:
What if figuring out your future felt more like playing a game?
That's how Orquest — A Game for Your Future! was born.
What We Built
Orquest is an AI-powered career discovery game that helps students explore their interests, discover possible careers, and build personalized educational pathways.
Instead of starting with a degree, we wanted students to discover the jobs that interest them first.
Our application includes:
- Interactive interest swipe cards and career matching.
- A Bubble Explorer for discovering careers.
- A catalog of 20 job families and 115 occupations.
- Google Gemini AI for career questions and educational guidance.
- Miami Dade College pathways and external learning resources.
- RPG-style missions where students can earn XP while working toward their goals.
The idea is to make career planning something students can actively explore instead of just reading a list of recommendations.
Our Tech Stack
We built Orquest using React, JavaScript, Vite, Python, and FastAPI.
We integrated Google Gemini API for career guidance and used GitHub to manage our team's work.
We also experimented with Swarms API and Prune API, successfully testing a three-agent Swarms workflow and collecting a verified signed Prune report.
For deployment, we used Docker and Render.
During development, we worked with OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Base44 to help us build, debug, and improve different parts of the application.
The Challenges Were Real
One of the hardest parts wasn't writing the code. It was making everything work together.
At one point, our frontend couldn't communicate with our backend because of a CORS issue.
Then we spent a lot of time trying to get Gemini working. Our API requests kept failing until we discovered a problem with the JSON schema we were sending.
We also had to manage different GitHub branches, integrate our teammates' work, and deal with AI development tool limits. When one of our teammates ran out of Codex credits, he switched to Base44 to continue improving the UI.
And of course, we were doing all of this while trying to stay within a $0 out-of-pocket budget.
Eventually, we got Orquest deployed publicly, and seeing Gemini generate a real career response through our website was one of the best moments of the hackathon.
What I Learned
This hackathon taught me that software development is much more than knowing how to program.
You need to understand how different systems connect, how to investigate errors, how to communicate with your team, and how to make decisions when time is running out.
I also learned a lot about REST APIs, AI integrations, frontend/backend communication, testing, and deployment.
One of my biggest takeaways was that getting something to work is exciting, but understanding why it works is even more valuable.
What's Next?
Orquest is still growing. We want to improve the user experience, expand our verified educational pathways, and eventually let students save their career progress permanently.
This weekend showed me how much a team can accomplish when everyone brings different skills and ideas together.
I'm grateful for the experience and everything we learned along the way.
Orquest — A Game for Your Future! 🚀
