Fourdesire’s Initial Projects and the Gamification of Personal Finance

This isn’t the first time the mobile development team at Fourdesire has worked with tracker apps. They started with Plant Nanny, an app for tracking water intake, and Walkr, a space-themed step counter. When it was time to develop a new project, general director Taco Chen noted that the majority of personal finance apps on the market were purely functional. They were boring and repetitive, which made people lose interest in tracking their spending. With that thought in mind, in 2016 the team started working on a new app, Fortune City.

They wanted to make a personal finance tracker that was entertaining, so that creating good habits didn’t require lots of effort. This was the developers’ main goal: creating an app that was fun to play. If users are engaged in the process, then the thought of tracking spending doesn’t cause annoyance. It’s no longer a daily hassle for them.

Fortune City’s Mechanics and Visual Style

In Fortune City, every expense you enter turns into real estate. So, if you spend money at the grocery store, a food stall appears in your city. You can upgrade the building category and combine several stalls into a large family restaurant. As you keep track of your spending, you create a megalopolis on your phone. After some time goes by, you can evaluate your consumer habits just by looking at your buildings. How does your city look right now? What types of buildings are dominating and which are falling behind?

You become the mayor of the city and take responsibility for its fate. You build new buildings, earn money and spend it on developing your megalopolis. The citizens of Fortune City aren’t sitting idle, either: they work in your establishments, achieving their goals and sometimes giving you tasks, like finding something and getting a valuable reward for it.

It’s worth noting that the developers tried to make life in the virtual city reflect reality as much as possible: every citizen has a unique appearance and personality, as well as their own demands and favorite activities. You can only make your citizens truly happy if you take their wishes into consideration.

At first, the Fortune City interface was designed in a “Hollywood” style, with bold lines and bright colors. With time, the developers realized that the target audience required a different approach.

While building and developing their cities, users found their demands changing. It turned out that for some Mayors, it wasn’t enough to just track spending. They needed a more powerful tool for managing money, which would help them gradually earn a fortune.

So, in 2018 the Fourdesire team developed the CFO service. When players subscribe to the service, they gain access to detailed analysis and learn to develop an effective financial strategy. They can set limits on categories of goods, recognize overspending in time, and get detailed reports for each month.

Inlingo Studio: How We Translated Fortune City

Before Inlingo got involved, the app supported five languages: traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English. When deciding which additional languages to localize into, the developers considered several factors: the location of existing players, the financial situation and economy of the regions, and the overall number of speakers. In the end, the choice fell on Brazilian Portuguese, Thai and Latin-American Spanish.

At Inlingo, the choice of translators for a specific project is very important, since the team is what determines the results, to a large extent. The translators who were chosen to work on Fortune City all had experience in the field of finance.

The Inlingo team finished translating 35,000 words into 3 languages over 1.5 months, and results were almost instant. The number of downloads in the new markets doubled, on average, over the year.

Localization Examples

Localizing content for people with different cultural backgrounds has many complexities. Our translators often have to find imaginative solutions to convey the necessary meaning to a new audience. Fortune City was no exception.

New Seasons

During the translation into Portuguese, our translator noted that the seasons there did not correspond to the customary seasons used in Western Europe. One feature of the southern hemisphere is that the seasons are reversed. When it’s winter in Russia, it’s summer in Brazil. There, summer starts in December and ends in March.

Struggling With Limits

During translation into a new language, the text often becomes longer than it was in the original. When dealing with character limits, this nuance can be a big headache.

No Brands Allowed

One of the client’s most important requirements was attention to names—no references to popular brands were allowed in the app. However, surprises can appear where you don’t expect them during translation.

One of the characters in the app is an owl named Owdy. During the translation into Thai, an exact transliteration of the name ended up matching the name of the car brand, อาวดี้ or Audi. We had to rename the animal and give him a literal name: Owl, or น้องฮูก. That was the only way to avoid referencing a popular brand in the text.

Culturalization is obligatory

Localization is more than just a literal translation of text. It also involves adapting to the culture of another country. When working on Fortune City, we often changed the details to make it sound more natural for people living in another hemisphere.

Adapting Asian cultural nuances for a Brazilian audience was one of the biggest problems we encountered when working on Fortune City. For example, the traditional Asian dish “hot pot” became feijoada, a very popular dish in Brazil made of beans, meat and cassava flour.

Before (on the left): hot pot. After (on the right): feijoada.

A similar adjustment was made regarding sports. A baseball had to give way to a soccer ball, since soccer is the national pastime in Brazil.

1 We localized the text into 3 languages
We translated 35,000 words into Brazilian Portuguese, Thai and Latin-American Spanish over 1.5 months.

2 We nearly doubled the number of downloads in new markets
In Brazil alone, the number of users grew by 3,768%

3 We ensured cultural adaptation
We didn’t just change the language. We also considered the cultural nuances of the new regions.

4 We tested the app with the new language options
We made sure that all the text fit in the app interface after translation.