My stock game lies to you on purpose. At 55%, the lies stopped meaning anything.

I'm a junior solo developer from South Korea. I use a translator to help me write in English. I'm making Daily Trader: Stock Game. It's a day-trading game with virtual money. A round lasts five minutes. There is also a one-minute mode. You watch the chart, read the news, and trade stocks. Sometimes the news is good but the price goes down. I put that in the game on purpose. But after changing the headlines, I checked how often the news matched the price. It was much less often than I expected. I wanted good news to be wrong sometimes Good news doesn't always make a stock go up in a real market. It can already be in the price. People can also sell when the news comes out. I wanted this in my game too. If good news always meant up and bad news always meant down, it would be too obvious. There wouldn't be much to think about after reading a headline. I wanted players to make decisions with incomplete information. The news should help, but sometimes it should be wrong. The headlines were clearer, but something was wrong The game generates each market before the round starts. That includes the stocks, prices, and news. The news appears during play, but the price reactions have already been decided. I rewrote the headlines to make them short and direct. Things like "major deal sealed" and "deal collapses at the last minute." It was easier to tell which news was good or bad now. Then I measured how often confirmed headlines matched the price direction. It was only 55%. The old generator chose the headline's tone separately from the price reaction. So even a headline saying a deal was confirmed didn't tell you much about which way the price would go. I wanted some fake-outs. But this was close to a coin flip. If reading the news barely helps, why read it? I had made noise. I changed how the headline is chosen Now the headline follows the price reaction. The generator uses the reaction to choose good or bad news, instead of choosing them separately. I kept exceptions for sell-the-news and news that was already priced in. A confirmed headline can still miss for those reasons. Rumors work differently. "Big deal rumored near" isn't a confirmed deal. It can be denied later. By the time the denial appears, the chart has already turned. I wanted to keep that delay too. After the change, confirmed headlines matched the price direction 82% of the time. I didn't make them match every time. I still want players to watch the chart after reading the news. But at 55%, I wasn't giving them much useful information to start with. The change also affected challenge codes When you finish a round, you can share your result with a challenge code. A friend can paste it into the game and play the exact same market. The stocks, prices, and news are all the same. For me, working alone, this was the best way to add competition without servers. Someone brags about their result and sends the code. Their friend can try the same market. That becomes a match without me having to build matchmaking or live rooms. But changing the news rule caused a problem here. The code uses a seed to generate the market. With the new rule, the same seed would make a different market. An old code shared with a friend would no longer give them the market that result came from. So I gave the new rule a new prefix, DANTA5. Codes starting with DANTA4 still use the old rule and open the old market. The prefix decides which version of the generator to use. Older codes, DANTA1, DANTA2, and DANTA3, are rejected. The game doesn't read them as a newer version and quietly give the player a different market. I started this by making the headlines shorter. Then I had to change how they were chosen, and keep the old rule for shared codes. I still want the news to be wrong sometimes. But I want reading it to be useful. That's why I stopped at 82%. The next time I change the market rule, the code prefix will be DANTA6. A friend using an old code should still get the market it was made for. The game uses virtual money only. It's a game, not investment advice. Daily Trader: Stock Game on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.binarytech.dantagame&utm_source=devto&utm_campaign=blog_202611