Reaping Rewards

Reaping Rewards is a video game I created to teach financial literacy. It introduces concepts like investments, stocks, supply and demand, interest rates, loans, and more as the game progresses.

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Inspiration

What inspired me to create this app was my motivation to help out my community. As I know economic and investing concepts already, my peers would tell me that it’s too much of a hassle to learn how to invest. Because of this, I knew they would miss out on a lot of opportunities, as well as lose hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars not learning this essential skill. Because of this, I decided to take it upon myself to create a fun game that taught people how to invest using my interests in computer science and business/economics. Teaching children/students how to invest at an early age can have drastic effects on them in the future for the better. To create this app, I used many algorithms used in real life economics to introduce topics such as credit score, loans, certificate of deposits, and more. This small idea eventually led to the creation of Reaping Rewards, an app/game that would help students learn business, economics, and finances while keeping it fun.

What it does

My game steadily introduces concepts to players as the game progresses. For example, the game teaches: investments, stocks, supply and demand, risk and reward, interest rates, certificate of deposits, banks, loans, debt, mortgage, and much more. To make it fun to learn, I made it a "Stardew Valley" type farming game. They can plant, harvest, sell, and automate crop production as well as fight crows and beat their farming competitor. To make the user want to complete the game and learn as many concepts as possible, I added an achievement system, as well as a dictionary that gives them money for reading it that contains all the definitions to investments. The game has a fully fleshed out tutorial and story line that people can play through.

How we built it

This game was built using Unity's game engine. I used the language C# as the main programming language. Other libraries like TMPro were used to make the UI more visually appealing. I planned everything out on a Trello board.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge I ran into was the tracking for robots; they can swap modes from harvesting and planting so they need to continuously search for plants. However, this could be very memory costly as they run every frame. To account for this, every time there's an update in soil, that's when the robots run. To prevent many robots from going to the same soil/plant, each robot is given a unique number ID, with the lowest number having the greatest priority of going first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The art work and music! The art work was created by myself and a friend, and I created the music myself too. I'm proud of how well the game goes together and is quite fun. The animations throughout the game are also very smooth.

What we learned

Creating this app led me to learn how to make top down games. This is the first top down game and farming game I've made. On top of this, I learned how to make music, and I learned a lot about finances. This game practically made me a financial literacy genius haha

What's next for Reaping Rewards

Maybe more storylines! In this game, you play forever: the morgage always increases and you're tasked with making more and more money. Maybe I'll add in a way to make the stocks system and supply/demand system more dynamic over time with main events that can cause drastic shifts. Maybe even weather events, or ways to buy more land. I was also thinking about adding items that increase speed, other stats, or special abilities!

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