Makan Nation

Singapore queues for its food, argues over the best chicken rice and saves a table with a packet of tissue. Makan Nation is a game about that hawker culture. Makan is Malay for “eat”. I made it for the Culture × Tech track of the Common Ground Makeathon in Singapore: a co-op hawker kitchen that runs from the street stalls of the 1950s to Singapore’s hundredth birthday in 2065, and a customer mode where you walk into any of NEA’s 129 hawker centres at lunch.

It runs in the browser, on a laptop or a phone. Play it here, or start at the Common Ground lobby, which has the game and four smaller apps that feed it. There’s a three minute film at the end of this letter.

In 2020, Hawker Culture in Singapore was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.¹ A hawker centre is where the island’s cultures share a table, and what happens there changes with every generation. That’s what the game tries to show.

Three tenses, four eras§

Every prototype I made for the makeathon reads a slice of Singapore culture in three tenses: what the archives kept, what we do with it now, and what we leave for later. In Makan Nation the tenses are eras. Each one changes the look, the prices, one rule of the kitchen and the music on the stall radio.

Prices follow Singapore’s food inflation. SingStat’s price index puts 2024 food prices at about 5.5 times 1961’s, so a plate in the 1950s kitchen costs about a fifth of what it costs today.² 2065 is a projection, and like everything else in that era, the game labels it as a guess. Every round opens with a dated fact from the archives, never one from later than the round’s era: in the 1980s you learn that by the end of 1986 there were 113 hawker centres, and that the last 80 street hawkers moved in that year.

Cooking a lunch rush§

The kitchen is co-op, in the style of Overcooked. Tickets come in, and you chop, cook, plate and serve before the queue loses patience. There are 14 stalls and 48 dishes and drinks, from chicken rice (steamed, roasted or soya sauce) to char kway teow and kaya toast, and eight chefs to pick from, across Singapore’s communities.

Two people can share a keyboard, up to four gamepads work, and phones get a stick with Grab, Chop, Dash and Throw buttons. To cook with friends, host a game and they scan a QR code or type a four letter code. Online play goes peer to peer, so it works from a static site with no game server.

Hire help for one job each (a washer, a slicer, a wok cook, a kopi uncle) and their wages come out of your takings, along with the rent. Every round ends with a profit and loss. That cost lens comes from Hawkernomics, a game about hawker economics from Hack for Public Good 2025, and the game credits it. Hiring every helper runs at a loss, on purpose.

The results screen also has a rojak meter: whose recipes you cooked, Hainanese, Hokkien, Teochew, Malay, Indian Muslim, Peranakan and more. Then you can leave a short memory about a dish. It goes into the recipe book and comes back as something a customer says in a later round, so playing the game slowly collects an oral history.

Six languages at the counter§

Customers order in Singlish, Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien or Tamil. Each ticket shows the phrase, how to say it and what it means, and every phrase is checked against Wiktionary. The language changes the job: a customer who asks for bungkus (Malay) or dǎbāo (Mandarin) wants a takeaway box, and you have to build the order in one.

One order, the way the game’s customers say it:

Drink orders arrive in kopitiam code, like kopi-o kosong peng, and each ticket links to the Kopi Compiler to explain it.

Customers speak their lines too. A browser can only speak with the voices its device has, and none of them has Hokkien, so the game ships its own clips: Hokkien from A*STAR’s MERaLiON model, and Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese and Tamil from OmniVoice.³ Singlish was harder, because no open model has a Singapore accent. I made synthetic Singapore voices and kept only the takes an accent classifier heard as Singaporean or Malaysian. The women’s voices passed. No man’s voice did, so men’s Singlish lines show as words in a bubble, and recording consenting Singaporean voices is the next step.

Three looks§

The same game has three looks, and they switch mid-round without a reload. Graphics tiers (Auto, Low, Medium, High) let it run on a school laptop: Auto starts phones on Medium and steps down if the frame rate drags.

Famous centres§

Nineteen well known centres have their own building, sign, colours, time of day and surroundings, built from archive research. Lau Pa Sat is a cast-iron octagon with a clock tower, Tiong Bahru Market is art deco, and Newton serves its BBQ stingray and carrot cake. Their famous dishes come up more often in the orders. Try Lau Pa Sat or Newton, then Free play.

Where sources disagree on when a centre opened (Maxwell, Tekka, Tiong Bahru, Whampoa, Old Airport Road), the game keeps both years.

Lunch at any of NEA’s 129 centres§

In the customer mode you are the one queuing. Pick any of NEA’s 129 hawker centres from a list or a map, look at the real place first, then walk in. The building outlines are real, from OpenStreetMap, and so are NEA’s stall counts. The inside is arranged by the game in hawker centre patterns, and the game says which is which.

Then lunch, the way it’s done:

A card says the next step, a dotted path shows where, and Go walks you there and joins the queue. There are three views: from above, over the shoulder, and through your own eyes. The rush is busy: parties of one to four, about 93% of tables taken, a long queue at the famous stall, and GrabFood and foodpanda riders in it with you. When nothing is free, the guide takes you to a table that’s nearly done and counts it down. Each hawker does the work of the dish you ordered (the wok and its flames, the cleaver, pulling kopi, fanning the satay) and calls your order back in the stall’s language.

Older eras have their own manners, taken from the archives. In the 1950s the centre is a street of pushcarts, nobody chopes, and the hawker clears up. In the 1980s nobody chopes either, and some tables belong to a stall whose hawker shoos you off. In 2065 a robot washes the plates.

Most hawker centres stand in HDB estates, and 82 of the 129 are HDB blocks themselves. The estate round each one is real: the HDB blocks nearby stand at their real height with their block numbers painted on, and the flats built over Chinatown Complex, Albert Centre and Hong Lim rise above the roof.

You can open any centre straight from a link. This one starts at Maxwell.

Hawker Passport and the Centre Manager§

The Passport is the campaign. You start as an apprentice at a 1950s street stall and work through nine stops to 2065, on a map of NEA’s centres. Seven of the stops are real centres from the right era: Maxwell, Tiong Bahru, Newton, Chinatown Complex, Tekka, Old Airport Road and Geylang Serai. A mentor introduces each stop’s dish, you cook a round, and a one question quiz with a source earns the stamp. At the end you choose which recipes to pass on.

The Centre Manager is the advanced mode. You run one of the 129 real centres for 14 days, breakfast, lunch and dinner: set menus and prices, order stock that spoils, hire help, pay rent and cleaning, and pair retiring hawkers with apprentices. If a hawker retires with no apprentice, the stall closes and its dishes leave the centre. Every number has a ”?” that explains it. Succession runs through the whole game: mentors hand you the ladle era by era, and in 2065 you pass it on.

The recipe book has a card for each of the 48 dishes, past, present and future: a photo, what it cost then and now, cooking videos, the phrases customers use, and the memories players have left. Every fact on a card links to its source.

Four small apps that feed it§

Four smaller prototypes came from the same three tenses. Three of them feed the game.

Time Capsule Radio is one dial from 1905 to 2065. The past is 17 shellac 78s from the Internet Archive (1905 to 1957) and 8 Rediffusion dialect dramas in Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Mandarin. The present is live Singapore radio in four languages. The future is songs sealed in a butter cookie tin until 2030, 2040, 2050 or 2065, which play muffled, as if through the lid. The radio plays on the game’s stall radio, and a song sealed for 2065 plays in the future kitchen.

Kopi Compiler treats kopitiam orders as a programming language. Type kopi-o kosong peng and it parses the order (black coffee, no sugar, iced), shows each word with the language it came from, and pours it. It writes the game’s drink orders, and reads every one of its 1,880 built-in orders out loud in the voice of a Malay uncle or a Singapore auntie. You can also teach uncle a new word.

Block Birthday: every HDB block has one. Type a postal code, or a block and street, and the block comes back as a cake with its age on the candles. It knows 13,357 blocks from HDB’s data, the songs and news of the year each was finished, and how long is left on its 99 year lease, with a board for notes to its 99th birthday. The 107 blocks HDB lists with a market or hawker centre open that centre in Makan Nation.

Musication is my own side project, on how music rhymes across cultures. Mo Li Hua, Arirang and Auld Lang Syne use the same five notes, and you can play them in 15 five-note systems from China, India, Japan, Java and elsewhere. It also has 16 seven-note modes under their many names, and Ed Sheeran’s argument that there are only so many notes, with the court rulings.

How it’s made§

Everything comes from open data and archives, and each fact is linked next to the thing it explains:

• NEA’s 129 hawker centres, HDB’s 13,357 blocks and URA’s planning areas, from data.gov.sg.
• Building outlines from OpenStreetMap, street photos from KartaView, postal codes from OneMap.
• History from the National Library, Roots.gov.sg, NEA and the UNESCO nomination: 59 dated facts and profiles of 19 centres.
• Wiktionary for every phrase, and the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project for the old records.

The 3D is Three.js, picked over Babylon.js and PlayCanvas for size: 130 KB gzipped for a minimal lit scene, against 406 KB and 619 KB. Everything else is Bun, with no framework, and the whole thing is a static site on GitHub Pages. The test suite (106 tests) includes a bot that follows the game’s guide and cooks every dish, and customers who eat a whole lunch at several centres.

The game can play itself. With ?autoplay, every chef follows the guide, and that’s how the kitchen clips on this page were shot. All of the footage, film included, was recorded from the game in headless Chrome, with its own sound.

What the game simplifies§

The game labels its guesses. Some prices and costs are game guesses. Apprenticeships take 3 days instead of NEA’s 3 months, and each served ticket counts as 6 customers in the Centre Manager. The hygiene grade is a game grade (NEA moved to a new framework in January 2026). The inside of each hall is arranged by the game. 2065 is a guess. And the customer voices are synthetic.

The film§

Three minutes with sound, through every mode in turn: the radio, the kitchen and its eras, the Passport, the looks, lunch at a hawker centre, the Kopi Compiler and Block Birthday. Every shot is the game, scored with two public domain 78s from the radio’s collection: “Singapore” by Jaudas’ Society Orchestra (1919), and a Rasa Sayang medley by Krontjong Orchest Eurasia (1929).

Play it§

Play Makan Nation, or start at the Common Ground lobby. The source is on GitHub. Bring your kakis.

Notes

1. On 16 December 2020. UNESCO, Hawker culture in Singapore, community dining and culinary practices in a multicultural urban context. ↩

2. Annual change in the price index for Food, compounded from 1962 to 2024, from SingStat’s CPI series on data.gov.sg. The 1980s kitchen uses about 1985 prices. 2065 carries on at the 1985 to 2024 average of roughly 1.9% a year. ↩

3. MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS and OmniVoice. The accent check used CommonAccent’s classifier, which knows 16 accents including Singaporean and Malaysian. ↩