Dabbling in Finance

You’re just a lil guy in this big bad world of financing. We’re your tutorial on managing currency in this massive MMORPG called adulting. Dabbling in Finance? More like W Finance.

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Inspiration

One of us was listening to Hamilton while playing Valorant the other day and heard the line “we need to handle our financial situation” from the song My Shot while she made a headshot. Hence the idea of creating a gamified financing advice website.

What it does

Our website takes the major aspects of money and financial literacy and boils it down into a simple, easy to understand and navigate place to learn the essentials. This website even includes a couple of small games as learning assistance and an interactive map to reinforce concepts.

How we built it

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to make a website with mini-games incorporated in it, so we distributed tasks into two categories: website-building and game-making. We had a person work on the front-end, another on the back-end; one on the Unity game engine, another on Godot. We utilized GitHub to store our files in our repository.

For frontend development, we used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create our website. It was our first time working with Bootstrap as a framework, but it ended up being a fun learning experience since we had a lot of freedom with what we wanted our site to look like and function! It took a lot of research and experimentation to make it look nice and work properly, but we’re definitely proud of the final product.

Challenges

A lot of our issues stemmed from having to spend a lot of time working through unfamiliarity. One of our team members spent 11 hours figuring out how to work with Django on the backend. After figuring out the backend, we continued to have issues managing our Git repository and keeping things up to date since we weren’t used to working with different branches and going through the commits.

Accomplishments

As far as the website goes, we are very happy to have come to a stable, working version. This was our first time participating in a full-fledged hackathon and every aspect of the website was made because someone wanted to try building something they had never worked with before. And while it was tough figuring things out, the hours of scrolling through documentation, tutorials, and explanations paid off.

The mini games are considered quite complete given the limited timeframe we had. We also included self-drawn sprites of Peter the Anteater (UCI mascot) on the website and in the games.

What we learned

All of us did something different or something we had never touched before. This includes figuring out a game engine, learning a new language, and frameworks that none of us have ever used.

What's next for Dabbling in Finance?

Some features we want to add include:

  • An account login system along with more game integration into the website
  • More expansive and interactive modules and financial information
  • A budgeting calculator and dashboard to help keep track of income and expenses
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