Inspiration

Little media has portrayed credit unions and banks as a support systems for the community, but even at their most basic, these settings consistently support people through financial hardship, and connect them with other services that can be of the most help to each individual. Our inspiration for this project is unity, social sustainability, and community. Following discussions with Jennifer, we were inspired to create a heartfelt, warm narrative experience that bridges the cozy game genre with educational games. Through a “Paper’s please”-esque presentation, mixed with elements of 2D pixel based resource management, players not only learn a breadth of financial literacy covering scams, support systems, and credit building; but also develop their skills to discuss sensitive topics like finances with compassion, understanding, and impartiality. By unifying as a community and supporting each other with systems like circular economies, we can uplift each other and ensure no one is struggling without help.

What it does

Players have the ability to help customers through a branching dialogue system, and cross reference elements of conversation to “help book” in order to broaden their financial literacy, and also continue engagement with NPCs. This cross referencing feature encourages pattern recognition with concerns to scammers ect, which may benefit players in the future. They can also traverse the small setting we have developed, which upon continuation of the project, will feature more narratively relevant elements that the player can engage with. Players are rewarded for choosing compassionate dialogue options, and in the future, there are hopes that the “community trust” meter, will be a more diegetic feature of the game; featuring as monetary rewards, “promotions”, or interesting in game events.

How we built it

As a team, we had one programmer, an artist, and a narrative designer who also engaged with some art elements of the game. Throughout the duration of the 24 hours, we compiled assets to be put into the game to curate an engaging yet “cozy” narrative experience. ,

Challenges we ran into

We experienced a significant amount of problems developing our dialogue system, due to the intended intricacies of the idea. Whilst we haven’t been able to replicate the full spectrum of our idea, our hope would be that upon it’s continuation, we could integrate the complexities we had originally aimed to accomplish.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think as a team we have worked productively to our aims, and while the tight deadline limited the breadth of possibilities for the game; we are sure we have managed to instill the hopeful, community based message we aimed to introduce to the games narrative.

What we learned

Anticipating problems and managing scope has been an incredibly productive learning opportunity for us, with many adjustments having to be made to the final presentable product. Despite these limitations, we feel it has prepared us for future, similar situations, in which we may need to decide a hierarchy of importance of design elements.

What's next for Credit unions: For the community

We would love to expand development for this project further, and create a small game that not only encourages financial literacy within several different contexts; but also to encourage open discussion of finances, even when it seems embarrassing.