Scam a Brainrot

💡Inspiration💡

Kids today are genuinely unsafe online in ways that keep getting worse, and the existing solutions like safety videos, parental controls, and the "don't click suspicious links" lectures clearly aren't working. We chose to solve that with Roblox to meet kids where they already are, in a medium they actually engage with. Besides, as kids who grew up playing Roblox a long time ago, we always wanted to make our own games, but never had an opportunity to – until now.

❓What it does❓

Scam a Brainrot flips the script on online safety education. Instead of warning kids about scams, we let them run one.

Inspired by the tycoon genre, players build and expand their own scam operation in a Roblox world populated by brainrot animal NPCs, the internet's most gullible characters. Players start small with a booth on the street, scam unsuspecting brainrot animals for their gold, reinvest it and grow their operations unlocking more tools and techniques like phishing emails and fake free robux campaigns to steal accounts and personal info from unsuspecting NPCs. The more you "scam", the more gold you earn. But the real reward is what you walk away knowing: exactly how these tricks work, why they're effective, and how to spot them in the wild. This approach is grounded in inoculation theory, the same psychological principle behind the Cambridge "Bad News" game. Research shows that people who practice running manipulation are significantly more resistant to it than those who are simply warned.

🏗️How we built it🏗️

We built the whole game with Roblox Studio. One of the first things we did is set up the MCP Server in Roblox Studio and connected it to our coding agents, and we used Roblox Studio's asset library for designing our scenes and characters.

⚫️ How we used Gemma

After getting scammed, some of the brainrot characters are dejected and sit by the fountain. They talk to you, asking for your advice, trying to understand what just happened to them. This conversation is powered by the Gemma model from Google AI Studio. This is another step to further make sure kids viscerally understand the human cost of these schemes. Instead of being quizzed, the kids are the experts. The explain to the brainrot animal how the scam worked, why they fell for it, what they should watch out for next time. The Gemma API is accessed over a separate server hosted on Railway.com.

🟡 How we used Figma Make

Before we set out to make the 3D artifacts in the game on Roblox Studio, we visualized this idea on Figma Make as a ThreeJS web prototype with the initial tycoon layout and the aesthetic as soon as we had this idea. Thanks to Figma Make, we had something to build towards. Here's the figma link: https://www.figma.com/make/s5L9HGRRBNOBUmXshfwEm8/Cartoon-Town-Scene-Design?t=V8O6NzVxJO947vs7-20&fullscreen=1

🔴 How we used a GoDaddy domain

We found a very cool domain - https://dontclickthisl.ink/ on GoDaddy and claimed it, because stopping and thinking before you click is literally one of the first rules of online safety and related to the problem we were trying to solve with our actual hackathon project.

🚧Challenges we ran into🚧

The most difficult challenge we encountered was dealing with version controls and Roblox Studio. This project broke our patterns of using Git more often, but once we figured out how it worked, it wasn't a big problem anymore.

✅Accomplishments that we're proud of✅

This is our first roblox game and the first video game too, we're both very happy to get this completely working and break free from our usual web and mobile app interfaces.