Cuan Quest.

Cuan Quest is a financial life simulation game for Android. Players start out as school graduates with no job, find work, split their salary, save, and slowly invest their way to financial freedom before old age. Every coin, price, and company in the game is fictional, so players can make mistakes without losing anything real.

The challenge

Financial literacy often feels abstract. Terms like inflation, mutual funds, or leverage are easy to memorize and hard to feel. Meanwhile, investment scams, illegal online lenders, and phishing keep finding new victims. We wanted a safe place to practice, where players learn from decisions and their consequences instead of textbook-style walls of text.

Approach

• One turn, one month. Each month players split their pay through a Salary Plan covering needs, lifestyle, emergency fund, dreams, and investing, then see an illustrated report of where the money went.

• The Risk Ladder. 18 fictional instruments, from savings and deposits up to stocks, gold, forex, and crypto, unlock step by step. A "what if" slider shows the upside and downside before buying, with inflation, tax, and fees included.

• A whole life. Careers across 6 fields and 28 positions, going back to college, houses and mortgages, vehicles, insurance, and 126 life events, including common scams players learn to spot.

• Easy to follow. Starter missions guide the first steps, a Goal Path shows how close players are to their target, and every line of text stays short, with a ? button for the full explanation.

Under the hood

The game is built with Godot 4.7 and GDScript, saves progress locally with SQLite, works offline, and has no ads or purchases. Content such as events, quizzes, and the glossary lives in JSON data, so it can keep growing without code changes. Two developer tools guard quality: an economy balance simulator that plays dozens of games per player type over 30 years, and a text budget check that fails when any on-screen sentence runs too long.

Results

In about three weeks, Cuan Quest went through four versions up to APK 2.0.1: 126 life events, 190 weekly quiz questions, a 119-term glossary, 21 achievement badges, music and sound effects, and 4 life chapters through retirement with a legacy score at the end. A Play Store release is being prepared, and the next version adds partners and marriage.

Cuan Quest is an educational simulation, not financial advice.