Fortuner

Inspiration

In today’s fast-paced world, financial literacy has become an essential skill that is often overlooked in traditional education. Many young people graduate high school and enter adulthood without a clear understanding of how to manage money, save for the future, or avoid debt. Inspired by this gap, this game was designed with the goal of empowering students to make smarter financial choices.

Many students fresh out of high school/college struggle with basic financial decisions—like managing allowances, budgeting for school expenses, or even understanding the impact of credit. These challenges often led to stress, addictions, poor financial habits, and long-term financial instability. Witnessing the consequences of these financial missteps inspired the idea of creating a fun, interactive learning experience that could teach students the principles of money management in a way that felt engaging and practical.

Set in a virtual world where players make everyday financial decisions, the game challenges students to balance earning, saving, spending, and investing while navigating real-life scenarios like paying bills, handling unexpected expenses, and planning for their future. The goal was simple: give students a head start by equipping them with financial skills before they face these challenges in the real world.

This game serves as a digital playground where students can safely learn from their mistakes, explore the consequences of different financial paths, and discover that smart money management isn’t just about math—it’s about developing habits that lead to long-term success.

What it does

We have a banking system that gives the player interest over time, including when offline. The stock market randomly (weighted) changes over time, including when offline. The slot machine can be played for $1000, and has prizes up to $15000.

How we built it

Here's what we planned to do with our game, after removing many features due to time constraint:

• Have a banking system with interest to show that you should have a savings account that you put extra money into to compound over time
• Income every day based off of a job
• Some way to increase job income (promotions/a different job)
• Stock market simulation to show how useful the stock market can be for increasing your income streams
• Casino with slot machine, blackjack, and poker, all of which are rigged against the player a bit more than real life casinos are, in order to show them that although these games can be fun, you shouldn't play them too much or go outside your budget

We built the backend using python, and used the CMU graphics plugin to create the frontend. Unfortunately, we had to cut out more content due to this, but almost all the ideas still exist in the game.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many issues with frontend, and none of us had much experience with it, so it took a lot longer to bugfix than we thought it would. One of the more annoying issues was that one of our teammates, a backend developer, was unable to update python, and it took him about two days to finally figure out the problem with the installation, which delayed portions of our frontend. Furthermore, we were running into many problems while merging files in Github due to people working at the same time. We solved this issue by making sure that we sent a Live Share link in a group chat whenever we started working, so if someone wanted to work at the same time, they could join Live Share instead of dealing with merge conflicts later down the road. Another issue we had was that we needed to find a way to run the game even while the user had the window completely closed. We managed to solve this by noting down when the user saved their file and closed the window, and when the user opens the application again, we calculate how much time has passed and calculate in-game time accordingly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to use CMU graphics, as well as implementing user input through it. We are also very happy that we were able to bring all of our ideas at least partially into our final product. The offline calculations were another big accomplishment for us, as it meant the game would be much more realistic.

What we learned

We all learned some frontend and how to use CMU graphics, as well as general skills when it comes to collaboration with others. This includes the utilization of the Live Share feature in Visual Studio Code, and Github.

What's next for Fortuner

We have many ideas for expanding the game that we haven't had time to implement. They are listed above in the section with what we planned to do with the game. An example of a feature we cut out beforehand would be yearly events such as holidays or birthdays, where you would be required to buy things for other people.

Built With

• cmu-graphics
• python