WealthOrHealth Dev Blog #1

"Health is wealth. Money is time."
— Henry Wealthor, Founder and CEO of WealthorHealth

Ever wondered what it's like to be the person deciding whether your insurance claim gets approved or denied? No? WealthorHealth is a document verification game where you play as a health insurance analyst, spotting inconsistencies in claims. Sounds fun right?

No?

Well making it has been so far. I'm using this dev blog to keep myself accountable during development. This will only be my 30th game that never reaches another soul.

Progress Highlights

Data Generation: I've built factories that generate unlimited insurance claims with controlled inconsistencies. Wearing the system architect hat has been incredibly satisfying, though ensuring the logic works properly was more complex than expected. Seeing the system now churn out endless realistic claims feels like magic.

Verification System/Validation Engine: This has been the most complicated aspect so far. Getting randomly generated claims to meet randomly generated criteria in specific volumes has been tricky. Introducing this system was the first time the game felt actually playable. Unit testing has been useful here. Good thing I deal with complicated validation providers for a living.

Art: I dove headfirst into pixel art with zero experience and quickly discovered I'm shithouse at it. Should've restricted my palette from day one. I'm eating RGB spaghetti for dinner. Carb loading for the Hutt Half Marathon this weekend. I still think pixel art was the right choice. It's timeless, small, and performant.

Technology: Vue.js. Since the game simulates using a web app, I'm keeping it native. I plan to home brew an animation controller. Everything done in js/html/css. Currently a production build is ~350kb without images.

What's Next

MVP Demo - 1 hour of gameplay

Art & Animation: I need to animate a few key characters to convey their personalities. I've kept artwork minimal, but bringing these individuals to life will make a huge difference. Especially looking forward to animating the player's cat. Wish Wellington library was open so I could go get some cat books.

More Content: One additional scene should provide enough art for about an hour of actual gameplay. Scenes take time to create but they're enjoyable to build and are key to the story.

Gameplay Depth: The basic loop works but it's simple. I want to introduce more creative verification challenges beyond "spot the difference" and add story elements with meaningful cost/benefit decisions. Currently players just earn money without a use for it.

UI Polish: It needs a lot of work, but I'm leaving this for now. As a front-end focused developer, this should be simple sauce pixel pushing, flex box centering, font family flavour, tweaning and tweaking.

Ka kite anō
Leo.