Addicting or Engaging? Daily Systems, Investing Feature, and Cosmetics!

Hello world! Hello Frenz. Welcome back to another devlog for my upcoming game, Rainy Day, a casual mobile game about financial literacy.

Addicting, Engaging or Neither? A Design Conflict

I don't want to waste your time. So, building on the daily scoring limit that I introduced last devlog, I have made more daily features such as a daily reward system and I honestly don't feel a 100 percent good about this part of the idea. I know its pretty common in mobile games but I just feel like this is a pretty low move that I'm doing to try and better engage my players. It's just buried in psychological tricks that can potentially get players addicted, not really engaged. Of course, I want people to play my game but it just feels irresponsible.

I'm really hoping that the real content of my attempts to financial awareness shines over all of this and that the daily limits of the game stops the project from getting to the wrong end of the spectrum. A part of me also thinks that it fits in with the whole theme of work in the game because in real life it's a big step to just show up. Still, it doesn't translate as well with this feature and doesn't make me feel a whole lot better.

Daily Reward System

We will test it out so below is the typical daily reward system I've made. Don't mind the text where it mentions when the next reward is because that is the actual time left until midnight and I didn't bother updating it. And for this demo, I've only made a day equal to 10 seconds so I can show that the day to day system works in this video but I need to do more testing and designing for when players are out of the application.

The first time players open the game for the day they get to claim coins and get to see the rewards they could get putting on a daily streak. It's simple, straightforward, I've mentioned my opinions about it and I would love to hear yours!

Score Equals Currency

To answer my question from the last devlog, the pseudo name for the score in Rainy Day will be coins. The game's currency is the score! So, just "showing up" for the day will give player's a higher score but I feel better about the other daily features that are more so about the 'real' content of the game rather than a psychological trick.

Investing Feature

The investing feature will 'open' and 'close' a simulation of the stock market daily. And Rainy Day's in-game stocks fluctuate up or down to represent the average movement of the type of stock it has cloned in real life. When I say cloned, I don't mean real-time and that the movement of the stock is just based off of a statistical range that I hard-coded.

The general cloned stocks are:

• Index stocks (just the total movement of the blue and green chip stocks for the day)
• Blue chip stocks (-1% to 1% Daily Range)
• Green chip stocks (-1% to 1% Daily Range)
• Cryptocurrencies (-10% to 10% Daily Range)

I've given each stock a base price of 600 and it will increase or decrease from there. Players will decide what's best for their money (score) with the investments they buy or sell. Also, for this to work, I needed to distinguish the difference between the players total coins versus their available coins for spending.

And something cool with these stocks that I'm thinking of is naming them after my supporters as well so do visit my website to make that happen!

Anyway, the whole idea here is to let players be aware of the fact that it's possible to grow money other than just putting it in a bank. I'm not a financial advisor but I specifically will design the game in favour of the players investing in basket of stocks which would be the index stock in the game. I just personally believe its the most care free way to invest with average returns of 10% annually rather than trying to beat the market trading and I don't want to get into it deeper.

Change Background Feature

This is a feature of the game I'm hoping players will actually avoid but I put in there to build player resilience from spending money on the things that aren't really needed. To help with this, I've made it so that players can only ever "rent" background colours for 2 weeks or so worth of gameplay then it goes back to default.

This is something I wish will bleed into their real-life somehow someway. I would like to add more cosmetics that challenges players to avoid superficial in-game temptations so if you have any ideas you would like to share, reach out!

Support My Work and Have Your Name in the Game!

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

November Donators

Thank you for reading and special thank you shoutout to my supporters who donated in November!

• Laura Milligan