Inspiration
Education, Gamification, T Rowe Price Investment Often, people struggle to make good investments due to a lack of financial literacy or good financial decision making skills. In order to teach these skills, we thought exposure to foundational financial principles from a young age would be beneficial, hence we decided to make a game that teaches the basics of different types of investments and each of their risks and benefits. In order to make the learning more enjoyable, we gave it a fantasy theme, where the different investment types will be represented as characters.
What it does
User playing as witch can interact with 5 different characters representing investment types Home screen in neighborhood displays all characters and their houses Can buy investments from each character, each char has a description of how their investment type works Go to users house to view investment status and sell Ability to go forward in time by day and see investments grow or shrink User gains gold through passive income from job selling potions User gains net worth throughout game from job + investments Learn why diverse portfolio is important Inside the game, the user plays as a witch character that can interact with the 5 different investment type characters, which are bonds, stocks, ETF’s, commodities, and certificates of deposits. The user can buy investments from these characters using currency earned passively from their job selling potions. Time passes in day increments, and clicking to the next day will show you changes in the value of your investments as well as your total net worth. Investments also have a sell button to cash out when you decide to, and in the case of bonds and CD’s that have a time minimum, a countdown will display until you’re allowed to cash out. This system teaches users about the importance of diversification firsthand and how to manage their money.
How we built it
The longest part of creating this project was to brainstorm a way to make a fun and educational financial education game. We struggled with coming up with a way to make abstract financial concepts like risk and rates of return, something tangible that players could feel. We ultimately ended up deciding on personifying each type of Investments.
Initially, we attempted to create the app in pixi.js, but we found that pixi.js was not well-suited to a game that was meant to be more of a point-and-click game.
We built this web game using React and storing all information in local Storage. We first designed the back-end aspects of the game, creating a javascript file with the purpose of retrieving and using the user’s data from the browser’s local storage. There are two key pieces of data stored in the game: the total amount of money currently owned by the witch, as well as the “tokens” currently owned by the witch (that can be sold to increase your income).
Challenges we ran into
Attempt to use Pixi.js, switching to react only Although we were able to move the character around with keyboard controls, pixi.js is is a graphical library, not a game development library. Therefore, simply moving a character across a screen required writing our own framework. Because we wanted to focus on the narrative/content of our game, we decided to switch to a pure react app (with some javascript). Ultimately, this was a point and click game.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Base functionality with buying and selling investments were able to be implemented Inclusion of 5 investment types
What we learned
Learned how to utilize local storage to save the game state Learned about different investment types, such as the difference between the benefits of bonds and CDs
What's next for Witch Stock
Improving our user interface. One of the difficulties we faced due to the time constraint was creating a cohesive and clean user interface. Our current interface is a bit clunky in some places, with a scroll bar appearing on the map screen, and the “shelf” of tokens being a simple stack of boxes. While this serves its purpose, it is not very aesthetic. A time/level component. We want to explore how best-investment practices change as people progress through each life stage. It would be exciting to build a game where users can see their progress as they get older. Users would learn to make more risky investments early on in their life when they can bounce back from downfalls, then switch to more reliable investments as they get older. An “unlocking” process where users unlock different people as they progress through their life. Detailed information about stocks and bonds in a booklet that the witch can open and read at any time. Detailed interaction with characters/specific events. While we were limited by our time constraints during this hackathon, it would have been more exciting to add conversations with characters. We could have Jack and the bean”STOCK” have a laid back and fickle attitude, while James “BOND” is more serious
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