Challenge

Newcomers to trine.com sometimes have difficulty understanding how investment works, and how come investments can affect developing countries. The idea behind Trinea was to educate users on investment mechanisms and the different effects it might have on developing countries, through the means of a light-weight interactive strategy game.

Idea

By having investment options with different price, risk and interest rate, a user develops an understanding of how the risk involved affects their investment. Each investment has different effects on the country of Trinea, which could be one or multiple of the following; availability of clean electricity, the amount of CO2 emissions, economic growth, quality education, equality, innovation, and good health of population.

The game is played in turns, each turn represents year in the country of Trinea. The player can choose in each turn to invest in one of 4 randomized investment options, and then see a report of the effects of their actions, both in monetary return and the effects the different parameters of Trinea.

Implementation

The game is built using React with React hooks. In order to make the visuals feel more alive we’ve used WebGL and some CSS animations to animate a map.

Conclusion

Building a game that works was, as expected, pretty easy. However, making the game experience fun turned out to be more complicated. Finding the balance between investment prices, risk and return, along with the effects on Trinea is a difficult and iterative process. The game should feel challenging without being frustrating to play, while still being simple and short. The player should leave the game knowing how investment works, and that there are different routes to invest money, all of which have subtle and less subtle effects on our world.

For us, the project was not technically challenging, but was still fun to make.

The game: https://prototypsthlm.gitlab.io/trine-trinea/