Budgeting, Finance, and... Gamification?

11/07/14

I'm financially illiterate.

I'm pretty sure. At the very least, I'm still unsure at what being financially literate really means.

I need to be better about my finances. I need to start following a budget again. I need to make a better tool for budgeting.

That tool might as well be built up into a game.

Now, I've already started making a budgeting tool. Currently, it's just a single python script that takes spending info from a user via terminal and appends it to a single log file.

Got a ways to go, but it's a good start.

Currently, the plan for the tool is to adapt it to my personal needs as far as basic budget tracking goes. At the same time, I'd like to slowly inject lessons I learn while reading the tutorials over at Investopedia.

Further, I'd like to "gamify" the whole thing. Which is to say, adequately introduce challenges as the player is ready to tackle them. I'm not sure how much I care about the "reward" aspect of gamification, but I'll explore that as I go along. I'll also need a good system for measuring failure, and reintroducing old, easier challenges to train user for harder challenges, and also curb any possible frustration.

It's all really vague right now because I don't really know what I'm doing.

Which reminds me, a big part of why I'm making so little progress on game dev stuff so far might be because I'm trying to learn so much at once. It'll probably be a good idea to set aside some time to make already defined games, for actual game programming purposes.

But that's a blog post for another day.

Anyways, speaking of budgeting, I need to log my spending for the past few days.