SideQuest

Inspiration

Saving money is hard, but spending money is easy. According to Forbes, Americans on average only save 3.6% of their disposible income. As college students who want to experience life and have fun with our friends, we are the prime victims of bad spending habits. Why study for free at home when I can go to a cafe to study and sip an overpriced drink? I choose to be happy and live in the moment, and that type of instant gratification is something saving money can't do. So, we created SideQuest, an app that gamifies saving in a way that makes it as fulfilling and fun as saving money.

What it does

This is a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game where each decision you make is linked to a financial decision. Making choices and progressing in the story forces you to save money, offering immediate gratification to saving money while you're playing the game. The user will go through a month-long journey of the story. Every day, the app notifies the users three times with a new scenario. The user will then be provided with four multiple-choice questions about how they want to respond and continue with the story, and each of these choices contains a specified amount the user can spend. Choosing an option triggers an automatic transfer of the selected amount from the user’s checking account to their savings.

How we built it

We used FastAPI to build a robust backend, leveraging Heroku as our server for Gemini's API to create interactive stories. We also integrated Fetch.ai to progress the story and dynamically generate choices for the user, thereby influencing the story progression based on previous scenarios. Swift and SwiftUI are then used to build out the front end to create iOS native applications. We also have a separate Figma prototype to test a more centralized storytelling experience to determine if that is a more engaging experience for our target audience.

Challenges we ran into

Xcode tends to break a lot, and its bugs are very persistent. Error logs are less telling than one would hope for it to be, and we were stuck on the same bug for the longest time. We even went to the point of completely uninstalling and reinstalling Xcode multiple times to no avail. In the end, we were able to pull through and get things working smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I still remember the first time we got the coded prototype working, it was such a huge milestone for us. The dev was learning Gemini and Fetch from scratch, so it was a slow start at first. Super proud of Steven for pulling through and being able to do so much in such a short amount of time!

What we learned

Hackathons can be so physically and mentally draining, but I always remember why I love them so much and continue to do them. Almost nothing went smoothly, but we were still able to pull through with such great work. Working tirelessly towards one project and getting it out is such an exhilarating experience. It gives you the chance to continue pursuing one thing that doesn't seem to work until it does, and it always feels so good getting to that point.

What's next for SideQuest

Our next step is to build out and code the Figma prototype that includes deeper gamification features such as health, happiness, and affection stats that are affected by each choice you make as a user. This flow provides more avenues that are not time-gated to save money through shopping for accessories, food, or medicine to keep your pet happy and healthy. We want to include these features to test if users may be more invested in their virtual pet by having higher stakes as well as more accessible ways to affect their pet’s stats through saving money.