Inspiration
Financial Literacy is such an important aspect of life that needs to be understood in order for stability. Growing up, our team realised that we were never truly taught about the basics of financial literacy in a way that we were able to understand. So, given the financial strain that so many people are facing these days during the pandemic, in a Post-COVID world, our team hopes to help educate children on the importance of managing their money in a way that is not only fun, but easy to understand. We hope to enter our project in the TD Challenge.
What it does
A Financial Quest is a medieval-themed 2D-platform game with a quiz used to help players understand financial literacy. The storyline starts with the main character, the Minister of Revenue for the Kingdom of Galinor who is tasked by the King to set out and find the Financial Wizard. The King explains to the Minister of Revenue that the treasury does not have enough money to support the Kingdom and they need help to save the Kingdom. The player can then traverse the level and at the end they would come across the Financial Wizard who gives the player tips on financial literacy and money management. The Wizard then tests the player's knowledge on what he just taught them and the game ends when the player answers all the questions correctly. You can check out the game using the google drive link we uploaded which contains the unity files for the project.
How we built it
The first step in our development process was figuring out how exactly we were going to teach kids about financial literacy in a way that they could easily understand. Given the time limit, we needed to find a project that was able to teach financial literacy in a way that was easy for children to comprehend. Our team decided to settle on building a game using Unity despite the fact that none of us had ever used Unity before. Not a single person on our team had any form of game development experience so it was a completely novel experience. We set up Unity and used character and environment asset packs from the Unity Asset Store to allow us to build the level. We built the level by assembling a tile palette with different tiles from the asset that we imported. Once the basic level was built we introduced our main character. We programmed the character movement and animation using C# files. Once all the characters were added into the level, we developed a script and using the Fungus tool we were able to add in the text frames for the characters. Once the text for the characters were created we refined the level adding smaller details to the background to make the level more appealing. We then added in the Quiz to the level and the game was completed.
Challenges we ran into
Our team faced a few challenges throughout the hackathon during the development of this project. The. first challenge was the fact that this was our team's first hackathon. We had no idea what to expect and went into this relatively blindly. We were worried that we would not be able to accomplish anything significant in the given timeframe. The second challenge we faced was trying to learn how to use unity to develop a game in less than 24 hours. We knew we wanted to try something new so we decided that game development could be fun. We were right, it was definitely fun, but it was equally as challenging. The learning curve was steep considering we were completely new to Unity. We had no idea how we would even begin to develop our game. A lot of our time was spent trying to figure out how to navigate through Unity to turn our vision into reality.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As engineers, you should be able to refine your ideas in order to fit given deadlines. Despite the deadline of 24 hours, our team was able to do this and we managed to create a game that we are incredibly proud of. We were able to not only learn the basics of Unity, but also create a game that is fun and accessible in a manner of a few hours. We truly believe that this game can teach children the importance of financial literacy and that is the most important accomplishment to us.
What we learned
Our team learnt the basics of game development through the use of Unity. We learnt how to create a 2D platform game with different characters. We learnt how to animate our character and build levels with obstacles. We also learnt how to use Fungus in Unity to allow our characters to speak and to implement our quiz. We also learnt a lot about financial literacy ourselves from the research we had to do on the topic in order to simplify the lessons for children. In a more sentimental aspect, we learnt a lot about our abilities as a team and what we can accomplish when we put our minds to something and set out to achieve our goals.
What's next for A Financial Quest
Our team hopes to expand the level for A Financial Quest and maybe include more obstacles and challenges. We wanted to also make the game more interactive by including a new level where the player has to now create a budget for the Kingdom and actually get to implement the knowledge they learnt.
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