GiveMeBloombergTerminalPlease

The login screen.
And the waiting room.
Once you load into the game you can see your networth and all items you own
You can search for assets ...
... Like Mate drinks.
And buy them.

Inspiration

Have you heard of the person that traded his way from a single red paperclip all the way to a house? Well, it’s a true story and it inspired us to build a fun game about trading digital items among friends (don’t worry, we did not work on NFTs 😀). Besides building something fun, we believe that financial education is incredibly important and set out to code a digital exchange that entertains people from all ages while they learn about market mechanisms through playful interaction. We are calling it GameOfStonks.

What it Does

GameOfStonks is a multiplayer game that runs in your browser, where you and your friends trade the so-called “stonks” with each other and with the machine. You enter the game by logging in on our website and wait in the lobby until enough other players have joined so that the game can begin. Now you have 10min to place “bid” and “ask” orders on the exchange and trade to increase your net worth. In the humble beginnings of your career you have no more than a few paper clips and some coins to your name. But if you have the feel for the market, if you are a true wolf of wall street, these paper clips are not just paper clips to you, they are your chance to climb up the ladder! As soon as the timer hits zero, the game ends and the rich winners are celebrated. Are you up for the challenge?

How we Did it

We designed and built the front and back ends of our web app in teams of two and two, since both are comparably complex and our areas of expertise are that way. The backend is written in Go and manages the central logic of the exchange and the game. Incoming user requests to add, update or delete their orders are processed and written to a database (MongoDB). Then, a response is sent to the frontend containing information on the user’s financial portfolio, open orders, previously matched orders, etc. Next, the React-and-Typescript frontend displays all information for each individual user. Finally though, we were only able to build this because of our great teamwork and dedication to bringing the idea to life.

Challenges we Faced

We love what we built during the hack, but it was not easy. Two aspects in particular were challenging for us: Ideation. This is never simple and we also stayed awake too long… Overestimating the complexity of the project: We did not anticipate many of the difficulties that we faced, particularly in the backend and were expecting to be done rather soon.

What we Are Proud of

We implemented a fully functional and rather complicated web app. We did not set out with the goal of writing lots of code, but in the end we needed over 3000 pure lines of Go and TypeScript to provide all necessary features. We are proud of this because it was stressful, but we did not give up! We are also proud of the awesome front-end design we came up with.

What we Learned

Some of us used Go for the first time during this project and liked it a lot.
A good team makes a hackathon soooo much better.

What’s Next for GameOfStonks

To take our game to the next level, it needs to support more users/lobbies. In addition, adding trading bots to the platform to make the environment more dynamic is interesting. We could even introduce algorithmic trading to the game and let people write simple strategies, thus adding to the educational side of it.

🚀🚀🚀