How the Miniature Stock Market Works in my Financial Education Indie Game

If I want to call Rainy Day a financial education game, I can't skip over investments. So, I've added a miniature stock market in the game to cover this important topic that only has five stocks available for players to invest in.

Before I go about how the stock market is all simulated in the game, I just want to say and acknowledge that I am not a financial advisor, so anything I say is not certified financial advice. I understand; however, that whatever I'm about to say may influence people, but this is just my opinion and its best for everyone to always do their own research.

With that said, the game temporarily locks players from accessing the stock market feature until they have maxed our their Emergency Funds upgrade. In the game, this means that players have saved and are prepped for a total of about eight Spendings that come their way. This advice is a little overboard, but in general, I think its always a good idea to have enough readily available savings to cover a couple of paychecks first, before getting into investing.

Then, players get to play with the investment feature which sparks another opinion that I have. When it comes to investing, I believe that it's not just about the money, but also independence, actually being able to sleep at night, live, and not have to worry about checking up on your portfolio constantly to see how it's doing.

In the investment world, basket of stocks, like index funds, are close to this idea. In Rainy Day, this is the low fluctuation index stock. I've programmed the whole simulation to be bias in favour of it. It's true to the "basket of stocks" nature, because it's basically the sum of the Blue Chip and the Green Chip stocks. When the Blue Chip is down, the Green Chip may be up to balance it all out. But I've skewed the numbers a bit so that when they are both down, the Index won't be as much.

Here comes another opinion. I believe cryptocurrencies are only to be considered when extra funds are available and are to be kept just at 5% of a portfolio, maybe 10% max. They just move around too much at the moment to feel real stability for the money invested in them. So, the same goes for how the two Alt Coin stocks in the game perform as well.

Daily, the stock prices move and players will get a breakdown of how their overall investment portfolio has performed.

And that is that. I personally kick myself from time to time for spending so much money in my early years of earning them on pointless stuff. Having a paycheck saved was not even a real thing. I was so clueless when it came to money. If the game can subconsciously get even one player into better personal finance, it's a successful project for me :)

Speaking of investments, I have a shameless plug to let you know that there are still spots available to have a stock in Rainy Day named after you by becoming a Supporter#. This opportunity closes soon as the game is expected to release next month.

Again, I can't thank the playtesters enough for their time and the very generous supporters of my work.

• Laura Milligan
• Jacob Huang
• Andrew Abrook
• Faiz Prasla

Love,
Renz