Life Ledger

Life Ledger is 1st experience life simulation game mode. While using our app,users are walked through real-world scenarios and forced to make financial decisions that affect their lifestyle and moral

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Life Ledger

Life Ledger is an interactive financial planning game that turns everyday money decisions into a playable adventure. Players navigate realistic situations, choose between competing priorities, and see how those decisions affect both their finances and their life balance.

Inspiration

Personal finance is often taught as a list of rules, even though real life rarely offers one perfect answer. We wanted to make financial learning more approachable by showing the tradeoffs behind decisions such as taking on debt, building savings, investing, supporting family, or protecting personal health.

What it does

Life Ledger gives each run a different starting financial situation and presents a series of decision points. Every choice changes the player’s financial and personal profile, including:

  • Cash, income, bills, debt, savings, and investments
  • Stress, health, relationships, and academics
  • Progress, score, net worth, and an end-of-run summary

The goal is not simply to collect the most money. Players must balance short-term needs with long-term stability and decide what kind of life they want to build.

How we built it

Life Ledger is a static web app built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so it can run directly in a browser without a backend or framework. The game uses data-driven scenario and event templates, a central state object, reusable rendering functions, and responsive CSS for the game interface.

The visual design combines a colorful board-game atmosphere with live financial meters and clear decision prompts. It is deployed as a static site at lifeledger.tech.

Challenges we ran into

  • Designing choices that felt meaningful without making one answer obviously correct
  • Keeping financial effects understandable while tracking several connected stats
  • Balancing financial progress with less measurable outcomes such as stress, health, and relationships
  • Making the game interface readable and usable across desktop and mobile screen sizes
  • Creating a satisfying game loop that works without accounts, a database, or server-side logic

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a playable financial simulation with varied starting scenarios and event paths
  • Made tradeoffs visible through live stats, progress meters, and a final summary
  • Connected financial decisions to broader life-balance outcomes
  • Created an approachable game-like experience for a topic that can feel intimidating
  • Kept the project lightweight and easy to run, test, and deploy as a static website

What we learned

We learned that financial education becomes more memorable when users can experiment with consequences instead of only reading advice. We also learned that good simulation design depends on showing tradeoffs clearly: a decision can improve income while increasing stress, or protect savings while slowing another goal.

What's next for Life Ledger

  • Add more scenarios and life stages
  • Introduce difficulty levels and different financial goals
  • Add accessibility improvements, including expanded keyboard and screen-reader support
  • Add optional progress history so players can compare multiple runs
  • Continue playtesting the balance and realism of event outcomes

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