InvestAid

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  Plan for our game

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  The game logic flowchart

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  Screenshot of working game

Inspiration

'Investing' is a scary word for many people (including me). Some people are worried about losing their money, while for others, it's just too complicated to get into with all the difficult-sounding terminology. To counter these worries, we are using something fun and enjoyable for everyone to ease them into entering the world of investing - a simple game. This game caters for all age groups, but was made with an intention to help get people nearing or planning for retirement into trading, because after decades of emplyment, we decided it would be nice to let them get some profits by which they can live a peaceful retirement life in that cottage they've always dreamed of under the bright blue sky.

What it does

This game uses a trading simulator...but not in the traditional sense of trading against real stocks, because that would be very open-ended and throws users into the wild. Instead, this game consists of nice trading challenges that the players complete. There is also a training section that introduces users to all the main terminology, in a fun and easily digestable chunks of information.

How we built it

We primarily used C# to create the game itself, including the UI and the game logic. The stocks were modelled by scraping real financial data with Yahoo Finance API using Python.

Challenges we ran into

Web scraping in C# was an interesting challenge to overcome without C# experience. Github was quite the challenge when working together since the pushes and pulls got a little confusing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The stocks were able to be displayed and the users can buy and sell stocks, and the training information was made nice and friendly for the users to understand.

What we learned

Github was a major learning experience, where we understood the importance of branching the project. Some of us also learnt C# for the first time by doing a large part of this program in it.

What's next for InvestAid

This is merely a prototype, so we could add more concepts to teach the user. This game was intended to work as a platformer game and this is a feature that could still be added. We wanted to add a playable avatar that could take different paths, filled with information posts that actually contain the training data. The game could also let users to actually invest in other types of financial instruments, and learn first-hand how risky the different types of instruments are. With more resources and time, we could also implement something similar to 'The Game of Life' to actually educate them on how useful investing could be.

Built With

• c#
• python