Inspiration
One member wanted to use datasets, specifically related to housing prices. Another member wanted to try to make a game, so we decided to combine the two ideas and create a renting simulator.
What it does
This is a draft of a game where players, through the character of Bill the Landlord, browse through different houses based on desired characteristics and buy them. We get the house data such as characteristics and purchase price from a database. This is an educational simulator because players can decide if they want to rent it and the best possible price based on various factors. If they set the price too high, they might not get a tenant. If it’s too low, they won’t get as much profit. Based on probability, they can earn profits from their rents. They might also take out mortgage loans to buy more houses to rent out and earn money in the long term. The goal of the game is to earn as much profit as possible by the end of 10 years.
How we built it
We built it through Pygame and Python. We also found a database about house details from Kaggle.
Challenges we ran into
Our team had very limited experience, so starting the project was difficult. We were originally going to make the game in Unity, but we realized how difficult Unity was to use and how unnecessary it would be in the late afternoon, so decided to switch to Pygame. It was difficult to extract data as well, and it was difficult to move on without extracting the data.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we completed some of the graphics and made a good outline, although we didn't get to finish it during this hackathon.
What we learned
We learned how to get data sets from kaggle and transform them into 2d arrays. We learned to use pygame for this project. We learned to be adaptive: we realized that our original idea of possibly implementing ml was out of our reach considering our time contrainsts. We realized that it would be unlikely to attach a python file to Unity, so we switched to pygame. We learned to collaborate in different aspects as we couldn't all work on the same exact peice at the same time. We learned to manage the load.
What's next for Bill's Renting Simulator
We plan on adding a selecting feature where players can click on the houses and a description pops up. From there, they will be able to buy the house. Then, they can choose to rent the house at a specific price. We hope to include a text input where the user can write what price they want to rent it at. We will implement probability based on house purchase price from a database to find what the sweet spot is for rent price vs what the user picked and their potential profits. We can also add more features like making it multiplayer and add a customer/tenant along with the seller.
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