Treehouse

You’re finishing the treehouse your dad abandoned, using his smart glasses to find the parts, sneaking around to collect them, and building it back piece by piece. Built in 24 hours with Melted Pixels for the 2025 Full Sail Hall of Fame Game Jam, in the middle of an already packed school week. It took 3rd out of 100+ entrants — a field that included alumni and working professionals, not just students.

The pitch that started it: what if your dad left behind everything you needed to finish what he started?

The loop is track supplies, sneak around, build the next piece. All the UI runs through the smart glasses, so there’s no pause menu — the TODO list, the highlighting, the directional pings all live in the fiction.

What I Built

• Inventory — modular pickup and storage with contextual interaction logic
• Treehouse build system — raycast-based slot placement that updates dynamically as the player moves and aims
• Smart glasses tracker — the TODO list, object highlighting, and directional pings that point you toward what you still need
• UI/UX — the entire HUD, menus, and overlays
• Integration — wiring the systems together into the actual moment-to-moment loop

The Team

We split by strength but everyone crossed lines where it helped:

• Joelle and Kyle — level design, spatial layout, item placement
• Dustin — AI behavior, stealth logic, in-game cutscenes
• Kyle — the distraction system built on throwable objects, which did a lot for the stealth dynamics
• Me — UI/UX, gameplay systems, inventory, building, smart glasses

Playtesting

This is the part I’d normally have more to say about. Playtests were clean. Players picked up the HUD tracking, inventory, and build prompts without prompting or confusion, and the loop held together from the first session. I’d put that down to iterating on UI clarity early rather than treating it as a polish pass at the end — by the time anyone else played it, the communication layer was already doing its job.

Cut For Time

Plank-by-plank building. Originally you’d construct the treehouse piece by piece with real customization over each section. We swapped to larger structural chunks — walls, platforms — to fit the timeline and keep the pacing tight.

The grief arc. The game was meant to get stranger as it went. Dad would become progressively more grotesque and surreal, the visuals and tension escalating alongside it, standing in for a kid working through losing him. That’s the version I still think about. It’s what would have taken this from a solid jam entry to something that stuck with people, and it’s the first thing I’d rebuild if we came back to it.

[ADD: playable build or gameplay video link, if one exists]