Budget Bloom

Inspiration

This is inspired by other life simulation games; our goal is to allow women to experience different budgeting situations that they might encounter later in life so that they can learn how to handle it properly.

What it does

Our project encourages people to save through a gamified journey and quests of budgeting. The user is able to learn basic budgeting techniques and knowledge from the minigames, which acts as a life simulation. On top of this, our project incorporates bank connection, where it is able to track personal purchase history, spending categories, and investments; users can also ask the AI chatbot for advice whenever they have budgeting questions or if they encounter an issue.

How we built it

For Budget Bloom's the frontend, we used SwiftUI iOS 17. For the backend, we used a centralized AppState object to keep all user data such as goals, deposits, and trade history in sync and persisted locally. For our chatbot, we integrated the Claude AI API.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges that we faced was we wanted to make and IOS app but not everyone had Macbook devices, which resulted in not everyone being able to test out the app and debug errors. However, we are still able to split the roles eveningly with UI design, arts, and coding, allowing us to be efficient with our time throughout this hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build four fully playable mini-games with distinct mechanics: a swiping budgeting game, a 44-card Reigns-inspired life simulator, a diversification-based paper trader, and “First Paycheck Shock,” a salary negotiation/tax breakdown simulator.

What we learned

We learned how to incoporate Swift into our project, and insert bank trackings.

What's next for Budget Bloom

Our next steps for Budget Bloom are focused on three areas, we plan to expand our minigame library to give users more engaging, educational ways to build financial skills and stay motivated. Second, we'll be enhancing the chatbot experience by the scope of its responses including the ability to connect users with a financial mentor when deeper guidance is needed. Lastly, we want to bring the pet companions to life by introducing a more realistic care system, where users can earn coins, purchase food, feed their pets, and take part in nurturing activities like grooming and bathing.