Hello world! Hello Frenz. Welcome back to another devlog for Rainy Day, a casual mobile game about financial literacy, that is coming soon!

I Can’t Last devlog, I introduced a daily reward system that I’ve implemented for the game and ever since then I’ve been having internal conflict. I’ve tried expressing it but I just can’t put Rainy Day out in the market having a pretty manipulative feature. It just doesn’t feel right so I got rid off it and stuck with ideas that is in theme with the real content of the game.

Sticking to the Casual Genre And I’ve also capped the daily hour (round of gameplay) limit to 4 instead of 8. I feel that this is a good balanced number that can be casually achieved by everyone while going about their lives.

General Upgrade Feature Tons of features have been added but I will start with the general upgrade feature. This provides more content that I generally want to encourage players to engage with besides just the stock investing feature outside of the core gameplay. The general upgrade feature is essentially another form of investment that players can set themselves up with for future success.

The current upgrades offered are:

1. Increased potential value earned per hour — by default starts at 60 and can be maxed out to 140. The keyword is potential as they will still have to work with stacking objects to get up to that certain value. And with more objects to try and stack, physics says that it gets even more hard to keep the stack stable.
2. Increased value multiplier per object — by default objects have values of 1, 2, or 3 with upgrades to max their values to 4, 8, and 12. This balances out the new difficulty curve introduced by the increased value per hour upgrade when it gets unlocked.

By designing the players overall score to be equivalent to their total in-game currency, I’m hoping to exercise their ability to think long term with this upgrade feature. With an upgrade, they will ‘lose’ for a short little bit and ‘win’ later on.

Retry Feature Giving 4 attempts daily for players to earn as much as they actively can make those 4 attempts valuable but I’m hoping to alleviate frustrations from misplay and other unexpected things by having a retry hour feature. This feature opens a design opportunity to exercise the player’s financial resiliency as it will be something that would be nice to have but is ultimately not needed, much like the change background feature.

Monetization Methods And hoping to live off of the things I create someday, it also opens an opportunity for me to utilize rewarded ads with the retry feature. With a little patience of watching an ad, players can restart an hour for free, making buying the retry feature more pointless to buy.

This is one of those things I don’t feel completely good implementing in the game but I really want my creations to pay all my other creations someday and its just another step towards achieving that dream. And to make me feel better about this decision, its not a feature a player can abuse repeatedly to try and get a perfect hour. It’s a one time thing per ‘hour’ and players will have the choice of getting this reward.

Backend Using Microsoft Azure Playfab Moving on, there’s then the sweet Microsoft Azure backend service that Rainy Day is now connected to!

Similar Stock Movement for all Players With this, all players will now have similar stock movements and makes it so much more convenient for making little dynamic changes without having to push out an update.

Cross-platform Leaderboard

Also, this means a cross-platform leaderboard for the game! This leaderboard will be a social motivator for players to improve their score and hopefully make the financial literacy content design more gamey and fun.

I will be cautious with how and when I display the leaderboard because its message of the richest player or richest looking player wins is not a message I want for the game.

I recently finished reading a book called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel and the message I want for the game is pretty much quoted from how the author sees finance:

“No matter how we save or invest I’m sure we’ll always have the goal of independence, and … whatever maximizes for sleeping well at night.”

So, I guess where I’m trying to get to is to design the game focusing on the personal aspects like their progression in the game rather than the leaderboard although it will be a strong external motivator for the players.

Bonus Feature Which brings me into the last feature I added which are the bonuses. These bonuses have different rewards and requirements to earn those rewards but they general are one out of 3 types.

1. Earn a certain amount of coins in an hour
2. Earn a total amount of coins (general)
3. Deposit earnings gained in an hour for a certain number of times

These hopefully even the odds in focusing players on their personal journey even just a little bit when compared against their position on the leaderboard.

Support My Work and Have Your Name in the Game! Rainy Day should be done soon and 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, or be named after a stock, consider doing a top donation subscription tier! 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.

December Donators Thank you for reading and special thank you shoutout to my website supporters who donated in December!

• Laura Milligan