Start of the Financial Literacy Part of Rainy Day & How I use Trello!

Hello world! Welcome back to another devlog for my financial literacy casual educational game, Rainy Day!

As promised from the last devlog, the game now has the basics of the scoring system I intend to use and emphasize the financial literacy part of the overall game idea.

Scoring System

As you see from the video above, the scoring system is very straight forward. It increments as the player succeeds to stack an object and decrements per stacked object that falls from the stack. And again, if you have been following the project, the game produces a random value per round of gameplay for the player to stack.

Currently, in my opinion, stacking anything that is 40% or more of that produced value is challenging enough but this is a percentage I am willing to change once the beta test opens up for all of you to voice out your opinions and design the game with me!

With that said, the percentage below the score counter is just that! It tells the player just how much of the valued objects that are expected to be dropped for that round that they were able to successfully stack. The larger the generated number for the round, the harder it gets to achieve 100% success of stacking them all.

Deposit Mechanic

This is where the deposit mechanic comes in useful. The player initially gets one deposit for the round and will require to work for another by successfully stacking just at least half of what is expected to drop. By at least half, I mean 40%, which again is open for change.

With the deposit mechanic, the player doesn't risk losing their valued stack when it collapses and "saves" them for the current round. When pressed just below the 40% threshold, the round basically ends and the player is credited for the value they have stacked. On the other hand, it is optimally used when the player reaches or surpasses the threshold because the extra deposit reward will essentially reset the round. At this point, the deposit feature will clear the current stack and credit the player with its total value, giving them a better chance at getting the highest score possible for the round to even a perfect 100%.

Start of the Financial Literacy Part of the Game

I'm getting excited having the start of the financial literacy part of the game going. It's very subtle to stay true to the casual genre but it is there! It will be in the future upgraded visual assets, use of words such as "deposit," and the game play itself with its looming get and save as much as you can from each round vibe.

How and Why I use Trello

As I develop the game, more and more ideas pop-up in my head with some being too extra or luxurious of a feature to implement while some are actually good to be implemented quality ideas. I can see this being common for any profession and I can only speak for game development but it can really clutter the mind. This is where Trello comes in super handy for me.

In there I can really just dump any thoughts out relating to my game aside from just general project management in agile-like ways and I really recommend it. The simple process of putting thoughts down somewhere really frees my brain for other things that may come up and I can access everything about my game from anywhere!

I keep it simple.

1. I have a list for things I know needs to get done for the game and I call it Sprint Backlog.
2. A list for major things that I can take from the backlogs which I turn into these little sprints where I break it down into smaller objectives to see how long it would take me to do.
3. An In Progress list for objectives and sprints I will commit to
4. A Completed Objectives and a Completed Sprints list to frame my accomplishments and keep me going. I find this really useful especially with any software development where the amount of work done in seemingly small features get overlooked.
5. Then, a list for what I consider good ideas and for those feature creeps that are too extra or luxurious
6. Lastly, a Bugs list which usually end up in the Sprint Backlogs or in the In Progress list. As an example and is actually part of this devlog would be a bug I had with the objects spawning in camera view which I had simply fixed using Unity's ViewportToWorldPoint function.

Up Next

Looking at my Sprint Backlog, I could start adding variety in the types of objects that fall but I really don't have any ideas for that yet that I really like. So, I may tackle a much newer task with implementing a daily system for limiting the value of collectibles that will be available for the player per day.

Support My Work and Have Your Name in the Game!

As usual, subscribe on here and or on your preferred media via my linktree to stay updated! And if you are ever interested in having your name forever embedded in the startup screen of the game once it is out, consider doing a top donation subcription tier on my website while bringing my dream life closer to reality at the same time! Anything helps so even a free subscription on my website is huge and you will be emailed a link to beta test Rainy Day once it's available.

October Donators

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• Laura Milligan