Hit or Holdings

logo
Gameplay Screen
Landing Page

Inspiration

With the variety of ways you can invest your money, the task itself may seem daunting to those who have never participated before. I remember when I first learned about investing your money, I thought it was a quick an easy way to grow your money, but it's far more complicated than that. With hackumbc, we wanted to create a simple, yet interesting solution to educate people on different aspects of investing to demystify investing as a whole. Insert Hit or Holdings, a Gamified solution loosely based on the blackjack casino game.

What it does

Hit or Holdings simulates market conditions over a five year period. Each year is considered 1 round, and through each round, the user makes investment decisions through each of the 4 quarters of the year. The user starts with 10,000 cash to invest, and accrues around 2500 of cash to invest every quarter. The user then makes decisions based on scripted market conditions and insights that, while can help guide a decision, are not the be all and end all. The goal is to show the user that nobody can predict the market, and to not make emotional decisions based on market conditions for example coming off of a bad quarter.

How we built it

We used React, Next.js and Tailwind CSS to build this app. We collaborated on github and designed assets on our own.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part of this project was designing the ui/ux. Me and my partner faced a steep learning curve as combined we have limited experience with css. Gameflow design was also quite difficult. We wanted to design something informative, but not boring to the user. We treaded on making this a full game, but for lack of time, a web application was the best solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a complete end-to-end gamified investment simulator in less that 24 hours. Engaging user experience loaded with useful information that the user can take with them.

What we learned

We both learned how to leverage our skills learned in classes such as software engineering to iterate over our ideas constantly. We weren't afraid to question our approach and it lead to something we can both be proud of.

What's next for Hit or Holdings

We hope to improve the user interface. We want to potentially use past data from previous years so the user can get an idea of what investors were looking at and compare the decisions they make to real life. We hope to implement the gemini api. We ran out of time, but we wanted to create a chatbot so the user could ask questions about the market, terminology, and previous scenarios to make informed decisions.