Finlingo

FinLingo

Inspiration People leave school knowing more about mitochondria than about money, and most finance apps feel like homework, so we wanted to gamify the whole learning-finance process.

What it does

FinLingo is a cozy pixel-art "money-life" game. You learn real financial skills through quick quizzes with a few different question styles; you earn or lose in-game cash based on how you answer; you practice with hands-on simulators that use real market data, and you spend what you earn decorating a dorm room that actually feels like yours.

How we built it

It's a native iOS app written in Swift. We used SwiftUI for the interface and SpriteKit for the animated pixel-art world, all backed by a custom economy engine and a save system that never wipes a player's progress.

Challenges we ran into

Making the interactions actually feel good, not just work. Our first matching question was technically fine but confusing to play, so we had to redesign it. Attaching real money to answers without letting people farm the same lesson over and over for cash. Bridging two different rendering worlds, since the tutorial overlay is built in SwiftUI but the game world runs in SpriteKit. Accomplishments that we're proud of We closed the gap between knowing and doing, so you can read a lesson and then tap once straight into the matching simulator. We gave learning real stakes by tying your quiz performance to your actual balance. We made progress feel personal with a room you get to decorate, plus a friendly first-run tour that welcomes new players. What we learned Game feel is a feature. A mechanic that works but confuses people is still broken. Incentives change behavior instantly. The moment we added money, we had to design against people gaming it. Good lessons are a design constraint. The answer has to be something you can genuinely learn from the lesson itself, not just guess.

What's next for FinLingo

Ship the decoration system and the adoptable pet. Add new rooms that work like deeper levels, where each one dives further into a topic with more intense, advanced questions once you have the basics down. Add more lessons, streaks, goals, and live financial data integrations.