Dragon Vault

Inspiration

Personal finance is a hurdle for billions: according to a survey by Discover only 22% of people who created a budget stuck with it. Additionally, childhood provides a unique opportunity to develop strong habits and financial literacy skills. Combining AI agents and gamification, our product seeks to integrate with RBC's existing youth finance tools to provide a new way for the next generation to learn skills that will support them far into adulthood.

What it does

The concept is simple, the user works to raise a pet, watching a small egg grow into a fearsome dragon. The user sets a weekly budget, and then imports their calendar, from there our AI agents use location, user habits, and other data in order to estimate how much certain days will cost (i.e: if you're going out for lunch in Vancouver on Monday it will calculate the estimated price, factoring in the kinds of restaurants you visit, secondary and tertiary costs such as transportation, etc.) Then, the user and their dragon fight their way through the week, vanquishing foe and phone bill alike. If the user successfully stays within their budget for the week their dragon levels up, and eventually evolves. However, if they exceed it: the dragon loses health, potentially fatally.

How we built it

James and Moe were full-stack developers: handling implementation, bug-fixes and system design, and practically anything else you could think of.

Lenore created the art: Drawing over 50 sprites, from characters to backgrounds, to UI assets.

Ibraheem handled the design and project managing: Building the team, creating mock-ups for the various pages, setting requirements, designing the game mechanics, and planning the presentation/demo.

Challenges we ran into

Merge conflicts, learning the Gemini API, handling changing requirements.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Fixing large errors, handling merge conflicts, utilizing each member's unique skills. Innovating by developing an entertaining and engaging user-focused finance tool.

What we learned

We learned how to adjust scope to handle tight deadlines, the importance of communication between design and implementation teams, the value of creativity and the importance of confidence.

What's next for Dragon Vault

We have roadmaps on two scales, in the short term, we hope to: -flesh out aspects of the UX, adding audio and animations -improve our AI by implementing a self-training algorithm based on the delta between the estimated and actual costs. -develop mobile releases for Android and IOS

In the long term, we aim to: -Work with RBC to integrate Dragon Vault into their existing MyDOH youth finance platform. -Add integration with new financial APIs once Canada finalizes legislation surrounding open-banking frameworks