“Pushing Your Luck” with The Rock Trust & Tinderbox Collective
31 March 2025
About the Project
The project was created in collaboration with the young people/game designers from Rock Trust with support from Fast Forward and Tinderbox Collective.
Our team thrive in collaborating with other charities and organisations who share similar passions and ethos to Fast Forward. When we got the opportunity to work together, we jumped at it!
It not only helps multiply the impact we can make across the third sector, but also allows us to complement each other’s work; share resources and help our projects reach an even wider audience.
If you aren’t already familiar with The Rock Trust, they are Scotland’s youth homelessness charity. Their team aim to end youth homelessness in Scotland by ensuring that every young person has access to expert youth specific services to assist them to avoid, resolve and move on from homelessness. They advise, educate and support young people to enable them to build the personal skills and resources required to make a positive and healthy transition to adulthood.
From grass-roots youth work to award-winning music productions, The Tinderbox Collective is passionate about building a vibrant and eclectic community of young musicians and artists in Scotland.
Over eight weeks, we developed a game together exploring gambling addiction, advertising, harm reduction advice and its effects on daily life. – and we’d love to tell you about it!
In this game, you play as a character navigating real life responsibilities – eating, sleeping, paying rent – while also having the option to gamble. The goal is to highlight the less visible consequences of gambling, the harms experienced and its impact on daily life. While creating the game, we open and frank discussions about harms experienced by the young people, their loved ones and their communities and what harm reduction advice looks like. The young people all agreed that the open and real discussion of gambling harm needs to be the first step towards recovery, hence the idea of the game.
The game was built using a game-making tool called Construct 3. Throughout the eight-week process, the group collaborated on ideas, deciding on how the gameplay works, making assets like drawing the visuals, and shaping the overall experience together.
About the game
The game consists of three mini-games:
1- Make Money/Don’t lose Money – A platformer-style game where you earn money for essential needs while avoiding loan sharks and rock bottom
2- Daily Life – Manage your avatar’s health and well-being by keeping track of key statistics, but activities also cost money and energy, in a Tamagotchi-style care game.
3- Gambling/Lucky Games – Inspired by real-life gambling, risk your hard earned money for a chance to win big.
We were excited when we received an opportunity to present the game to the “Youth link Digital spaces” conference in Stirling, where we were able to explain and showcase the game to other third sector workers. The young people were very happy to show off their incredible work and we were also very proud of all that they accomplished.
Our team cannot wait until our next project with the Rock Trust, so please keep your ears and eyes open for the next collaborative piece of work!
