Rainy Day

A money-life game. Two years. Twenty-four paydays. Every choice counts.

Rent is due, the car just broke down, Ramadan is coming, your friends are booking a weekend away, and a stranger online swears their trading bot pays 30 % a month. Rainy Day is a short, replayable game where every payday is a turn: plan your money, handle whatever life throws at you, and see what your habits add up to.

Play in your browser on phone or desktop, in English or Arabic. A run takes about 8 minutes (1 year) or 15 minutes (2 years).

Make FinLit Fun

Financial literacy is not a quiz at the end of this game: it is the game. Every card is a money decision with a real trade-off, every choice moves your wallet, your safety net, your debt and your mood, and the idea behind what just happened is one tap away as a lesson card. You learn the minimum-payment trap by falling into it, and compound growth by watching your own habit grow for 30 years.

How it plays

1. Payday. Your income arrives; rent, bills and loan payments go out automatically.
2. Plan. Share out the rest with sliders: groceries, fun, your emergency fund, investing, your card, and for Omar, the family back home. Try the 50/30/20 button.
3. Life happens. Surprise bills, temptations, job news, market crashes, Ramadan and Eid, and messages that are not what they seem. Choose what to do and how to pay.
4. Statement. See where the money went, what your savings earned and what debt cost you.
5. Results. A financial health score in five pillars, your turning points, “future you” 30 years on, and one small thing to try in real life this week.

Four lives

• Sam, first full-time job: a student loan and a busy social life.
• Noor, freelance designer: no debt, but income that is never the same twice.
• Jordan, young parent: a bigger rent and a credit card that never quite gets paid off.
• Omar, a nurse in Dubai: a steady salary and parents back home who count on the money he sends.

Made for the UAE and the region

• Full Arabic with a right-to-left layout, and the UAE dirham economy.
• An Islamic (interest-free) banking mode: savings earn a profit share, debt costs are finance charges, and the game is honest that interest-free does not mean cost-free.
• UAE life: Ramadan and Eid, the real cost of sending money home, Zakat and the nisab, gold jewellery vs bars, “3.5 % flat” loans vs the real APR, one rent cheque or four, your AECB credit score, Dubai’s rent index and end-of-service benefits.

What you will learn

Budgeting and paying yourself first · emergency funds · credit cards and the minimum-payment trap · buy now, pay later · payday loans and salary advances · compound growth · inflation and lifestyle creep · investing, diversification and market drops · spotting scams and phishing · insurance and takaful · remittance fees · Zakat · Islamic finance basics · flat rate vs APR · credit scores · end-of-service benefits. 32 lesson cards to collect.

Accessibility

• Readable typefaces, three text sizes, colour-blind-safe palette, and gains and losses also shown with signs, icons and line patterns.
• New to money words? Underlined words explain themselves, and there is a plain-language glossary.
• Full keyboard play (Tab, Enter, keys 1–4), touch and mouse; no timers.
• Reduce-motion option; no flashing; sound is never needed to play.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything. Keyboard: Tab to move, Enter or Space to press, 1–4 to choose on event cards, Esc closes windows.

Privacy

No account, no ads, no tracking: the game makes no network requests besides loading its own files, and progress is saved only in your browser.

Disclaimer

An educational game. Numbers are simplified and illustrative; returns, prices and rates are not predictions. Not financial advice. The Arabic translation was made with AI assistance and is being reviewed by a native speaker.

AI disclosure

Rainy Day was designed and coded with the help of Claude (Anthropic), including the English and Arabic text. Its 60 illustrations (character portraits, event cards and backgrounds) were generated with Google Flow (Nano Banana Pro) from prompts written for this game, then curated and colour-graded by hand; the image model never drew text. The trailer and gameplay-video narration is neural text-to-speech. No AI video, music or sound-effect generators were used: video footage is recorded from the real game, and all music and sound are synthesised by the game’s own code.

Credits

Design and development: Rui Codex (Selman Altinay), with AI assistance (Claude by Anthropic). Illustrations: Google Flow (Nano Banana Pro), art-directed and graded for this game. Fonts: Fraunces, Atkinson Hyperlegible and IBM Plex Sans Arabic (SIL Open Font License 1.1). Music, rain and sound effects are synthesised by the game’s own code.

Made for the Zoud GameLab financial literacy jam (2026), theme Make FinLit Fun.