Project Story – WealthQuest

We grew up playing tower-climbing and virtual pet games, where the excitement comes from training your pet or character to conquer each floor. But we noticed a common frustration:

Most games rely on time-gated mechanics – waiting for energy to recharge or for chests to unlock.

On the other side, budget tracking apps exist, but they often feel boring. Manually entering transactions every day gives little reward or motivation.

So we thought: What if one solution could address both problems?

Inspiration

We wanted to make budget tracking fun and rewarding, not a chore. Instead of making users wait for timers to tick down, we tied game progress to something far more valuable: real-life financial habits.

Every time users log income, track expenses, or save toward their goals, they aren’t just organizing their money—they’re powering up their pet (Nibry), climbing higher floors, and earning rewards.

This approach transforms financial discipline into an engaging daily ritual, blending productivity and entertainment in a way we haven’t seen before.

How We Built It

Flutter for seamless cross-platform mobile development.
Firebase for authentication, real-time database, and analytics.
Google Cloud + Gemini API for receipt scanning and AI-powered auto-logging.
Gamified design inspired by tower games, anime influences (One Piece’s Nika + Berry = “Nibry”), and user-friendly finance trackers.

We also used Dreamflow AI in a unique way: instead of giving it a vague app idea, we pasted our entire Business Requirements Document (BRD) plus our Clean Architecture guidelines. Dreamflow scaffolded a base project for us, which we refined, debugged, and aligned with our original UI/UX vision.

What We Learned

How to balance gameplay mechanics with real-world financial tracking.
The importance of habit-forming reward systems to encourage consistent user engagement.
Designing a product that’s not just functional but delightful to use every day.
How AI tools like Dreamflow can accelerate development while still requiring strong human creativity and engineering to polish the final product.

Challenges

Creating a fair progression system where users of different income levels feel equally rewarded.
Designing a pet leveling and streak system that motivates financial tracking without feeling like a grind.
Making the finance + gaming blend seamless, so users don’t feel like they’re juggling two unrelated apps.
Optimizing our monetization strategy: balancing affordability for Filipinos with sustainability given costs of Gemini, Google Cloud, and Firebase.

Closing Thought

What could have been a boring finance tracker or just another idle game became something more: a habit-forming tool where real-world financial discipline fuels in-game progress.

We believe WealthQuest not only makes money management less stressful but also inspires a healthier financial culture in our community.