Post-Grad Panic

The humble Comp Sci Grad VS. The Loan Shark
Game Living Room
XRP Ledger
XRP Ledger2
DigitalOcean1
DigitalOcean2
Cloudflare
Diagram1
Diagram2

Inspiration

We wanted to gameify financial literacy. As soon-to-be STEM graduates, we feel the impending doom of managing work, income, and happiness all at once. The degree gave us the skills to pay the bills, but not the skills to navigate the unexpected twists and turns of life after school. Post-Grad Panic is our digital solution to our real-world woes.

What it does

Art imitates life. Our art imitates our future lives. You are a newly graduated computer science grad working remotely from a shoddy apartment. After the stress of getting a degree, you have to now contend with the stress of surviving adult financial life, doing your job, and stacking bread in the form of CHD - our custom blockchain IOU token. You must manage your happiness and burnout meter to keep your work satisfactory. There is an ever-present threat looming: the loan shark. Go into debt, and feel the wrath of a risky creditor.

How we built it

We built our game on the Godot engine, backed by a private FastAPI service on DigitalOcean for secure game saves, exposed via a Cloudflare Tunnel. For blockchain features, a Cloudflare Worker handles XRPL transaction signing at the edge. This architecture lets us use the XRP Ledger for in-game currency and mint achievement/cosmetic tokens outside the game, while keeping sensitive data secure and off the client.

Challenges we ran into

Building, managing, and deploying a blockchain for a unique purpose
Creating a polished 2D game in Godot
Secure connection for the blockchain
HARDEST: Introducing MPT Signing functionality, considering our backend is written in C# (unsupported)