Inspiration
The inspiration for this project are games where you operate a 'business'. Some that we've played are Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity/Cities Skylines, Game Dev Tycoon. The massive room for growth (with a simple vending machine business) is also inspired by games like Cookie Clicker and Universal Paperclips. The financial aspect of this project was motivated by stock simulation applications, like eToro's Demo Trading Account.
What it does
The application allows you to run a vending machine business, it allows you to do most of what you would in real life. You must buy machines and ensure there are enough goods in the machines - which means purchasing them from vendors. The prices fluctuate weekly, so you are incentivized to purchase the goods when they are at their lowest price. Moreover, you can assign any price to the goods you are selling, which means you must determine the optimal balance between too many customers, but cheap goods - and too few customers, but expensive goods. The variety of goods in the vending machines are also factored in, and sales may decrease if there is not enough variety. Lastly, you are also able to use credit to your advantage: borrow money to begin (and expand) your vending machines empire, although be careful as each machine has a weekly cost.
How we built it
The application was built using Python (Flask) for the backend, and pure CSS, HTML and JS for the frontend. Half of it was built using a keyboard and mouse, the other half using caffeine.
Challenges we ran into
Both of us are not very familiar with frontend, and as such, much time was spent attempting to make the application look presentable. If we had more experience, we would have used a framework, like React, which would have sped up development time, and allow more features to be implemented.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team of 1st years, we are very proud to just be able to submit a working product. We've never worked under such tight time pressure (and sleep deprivation), so we're proud to just showcase our hard work.
What we learned
This is the first Hackathon either of us have attended, so you can imagine we learnt a lot. It's not necessary to say that we've improved our abilities in the languages/frameworks we used, but the best lessons were the transferable skills. Working as a team is a lot harder than we thought, so we learned how to collaborate. This also means that we learned how to use Git and Github, which we hadn't used extensively before. We also learned the importance of brainstorming, we spent ~2 hours just deciding on the best project to do, and it certainly was worth it. Another hugely important skill we learned was limiting a project scopes: in the past, our projects all had long timelines, but this time it was necessary to remove some proposed features.
What's next for Vending Tycoon
The main aspect we could improve would be more accurate simulations in the backend. Whilst they certainly are believable and relatively accurate at the moment, some things are missing. E.g: your past with one bank does not affect your benefits with another, which is unrealistic. A proper credit system would be implemented next for this simulator. Another feature that needs to be added are employees: this was initially intended to be added, because after all, a single person can't stock 1000 machines. Time did not allow for it though.
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