Duck Tycoon

Duck Tycoon is a multiplayer finance simulator that aims to teach financial concepts to young adults in an interactive way! Compete globally to maximize your net worth and top the leaderboards!

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Inspiration

Financial responsibility is one of the biggest hurdles that all young adults have to face as they become independent individuals in society. At the same time, while some students are interested, not all school provide substantial financial education. Duck Tycoon was created as an attempt to lower that barrier and help young adults transition into the next stage of their lives. We wanted to create an informative game that was not only fun to play, but an accurate emulation of the financial decisions that we face in real life. Investing, in particular, can be a daunting field to enter without experience. Duck Tycoon bridges this gap and serves as a gentle introduction to the necessary concepts utilized in managing personal finance. Why ducks? ducks are cool 😊

What it does

Duck Tycoon implements a functional in-game stock exchange that allows players to compete and interact with each other to make the best market decisions. The in-game exchange updates in real-time to accurately reflect supply and demand across all players. The banking system allows players to optimize their investments and introduces a risk-averse way to build capital. Additionally, there is an option to pursue further education or directly enter the workforce. This decision has a pivotal impact on gameplay and allows players to customize their experience. Players can earn and increase their salary through playing mini games.

How we built it

  • Deployed a Python Flask API on a Google Cloud Run instance for the backend
  • Utilized a Google Cloud PostgreSQL instance for database storage and management
  • Built the frontend utilizing React and Ant Design, deployed using Google Firebase hosting ## Challenges we ran into
  • Communication issues, each person was doing different parts simultaneously, so adjustments were constantly needed as each person brought up their own ideas/implementations.
  • Ensuring that the front end can communicate with the backend via Fetch requests and solving CORS errors
  • Deploying the communication between the database and the backend HTTP API on Google Cloud ## Accomplishments that we're proud of
  • Implemented a stock market simulator that is influenced by the actions of other users
  • Adding a fun twist to a stereotypically mundane subject like Finance ## What we learned
  • Communication is really important.
  • Time management, While CTF was fun, since we were serious about this project, it would have been better to have spent less time on CTF and more time on planning out everything in more detail so we're all on the same page.
  • Making a full end-to-end application is very time consuming and involves many complexities. Involving other teammates adds another layer of difficulty.

What's next for Duck Tycoon

  • Find and fix any bugs in the build
  • Implement more complex stock features (i.e. shorting options, margins, etc.)
  • Implement a better time tracking system, for helping with stock calculations and simulation
  • Implement Capital Investment feature to invest in goods that appreciate or depreciate
  • Make the main menu more interactive, either 2d or 3d graphics could go a long way
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