A team photo of Bingus & Friends! From left to right, Ryan, Holly (Bingus), Mike, Nathan

Inspiration

When we saw the brief regarding debt spirals & loan sharks, we immediately were inspired to make a platformer that was both fun and encouraged/educated people to make better financial habits. We used the character of Bingus, one of our DnD characters, to bring the game to life, and also to appeal to a larger audience, from younger people to adults. Further, after talking to Jennifer from Wave Community Bank, we were able to refine our idea and reflect the importance of things such as avoiding loan sharks, while also ensuring that the information we provide is accurate and well-communicated.

We also wanted to stress the importance and dangers of things such as Klarna, and other 'buy now pay later' schemes. This is reflected through the use of our 'shop & upgrades' mechanics, where players are able to buy upgrades for free, but they'll have to pay back the cost of it in [x] amount of levels.

What it does

We created a 2D platforming game where you collect coins, manage loans, and make your way to the top. We hope that it will help educate people about financial health, and the dangers of things like loan sharks, and how to spot them.

How we built it

We built Bingus & the Debt Spiral in GameMaker Studio 2 across 24 hours. We worked as a team to produce the assets, the programming, and the overall design.

Challenges we ran into

One of the largest challenges we encountered was issues with source control, more specifically GitHub. The morning of submission day, a lot of our progress was lost due to errors with GitHub. Luckily, we'd all made backups, and were able to copy across the lost work, but this did result in spending an hour and a half repeating work. However, due to this, we did end up refining things as we went, and it helped solidify our game idea and mechanics.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of getting a functional prototype made within such a short time constraint, especially with the issues we've had.

We've also managed to expand our skillsets and push ourselves out of our comfort zones, exploring mediums and different ways of doing things rather than defaulting to our established norms.

What we learned

We've learnt that 24 hours is a very short time! But, on a more serious note, we've learnt a lot about financial health, loan sharks, and how easy debt is for people to fall into, and how difficult it can be to get out of it.

On a more technical note, we've also learnt different ways of doing things in engines/software that we otherwise wouldn't have come across, and that while our game isn't the most polished or prettiest, it is functional and more than I think we thought we would be able to achieve.

What's next for Bingus & the Debt Spiral

If given more time, we would like to polish and refine the prototype we have, and add the rest of the mechanics that we initially concepted. Further, we'd like to give it another visual pass, and refine some of the assets and colour palette to be more cohesive.

Lastly, and most importantly, we'd like to develop it into a proper tool that could educate and help people understand the importance of recognising dangers like scams and loan sharks, while also educating them on how to better manage money and make informed financial decisions.