Today marks the day Hi Stakes Markets Game is feature complete.
It was a wild ride, the first version of this bad boy was in 2022 which I decided to go into Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica to devise asset pricing equations for stocks then commodities. I kept those in notes and collected a lot of information about financial markets. Launched a internal alpha accessible anywhere in 2023 then withered away, I opened the game every once in a while to trade a bit, but it was pretty boring.
2025 came and Gemini 2.5 Pro really showed me what I could do with the power of 10,000 engineers. I invested a lot of my time building up a massive amount of infrastructure from Databases to Release Management, I supercharged a lot of my existing libraries and release a ton of new ones.
October 2025, I came back to Hi Stakes Markets Game and declared it my focus to get done. I figured 1 month was enough to get it to alpha, but I was wrong. There were bugs in the game and really bad bugs in the infrastructure I built. I got them fixed, it wasn't easy. I added a new spur of the moment idea, tasks so players could be rewarded with in game credits (invest) and reputation (level building). I added derivatives, more than I wanted really. Options Trading and Binary Options were the only target, but then I added Futures contracts and Contract for Difference (CFD).
2025 was an insane year for me, an insane year for Hi Stakes Markets Game.
I thought maybe January 2026 would be the month to finally get it out there, no I decided to add a Bond Market and find more bugs, more fundamental bugs. Again, I got them fixed as far as i know. Things have been super stable and working, but I have no clue what other dragons there be. Some features are built into the game, but nothing exposes them or takes advantage of them so there is still work and features to be coded and verified.
Feature complete just means most of the coding is done, 99%. The remaining work is content, tweaking and verification. I spent the last 3 days trying to tweak asset pricing equations, but instead of Mathematica, I am using Jupyter to prototype and run simulations based on different price points, asset classes and economic states. It's still rudimentary to me, but the Jupyter notebooks are good enough. I think I have the right asset pricing equations now.
I'll submit the game in February after verification to Apple and Google and then market the bad boy. Giveaways, I think, will be the biggest sticking factor to the game. I'll start with gift cards and move from there. Probably monthly gift cards until we can go weekly.
Alrighty, I haven't thought much about my next project, but there's many projects I want to undertake. Roast of the Republic is definitely one I need to get back to and off the ground, it is less complicated than Hi Stakes Markets Game.