Build A Park | Devpost

Screenshot Mockup of building a cannon.
Screenshot Mockup of following a player to a blueprint they found.

Inspiration

Build A Park was inspired by the adventure playgrounds of 1950s and 60s, where kids used real tools and loose parts to build their own play spaces. It's also a direct response to the design philosophy of games within Roblox and the mobile scene, which are brilliantly engineered but optimized for manipulation over genuine fun. The central question was: can a game designer compete with all these Skinner boxes by building something that's intrinsically worth playing?

What it does

Build A Park is a simulation game where teens work together to turn an empty lot into a living playground. Players gather resources from the surrounding forest and mines, learn blueprints, and build structures — trampolines, soccer nets, sword racks, bouncy houses, pirate ships — that everyone in the session can use and play with. The best moments aren't planned by the game: one player builds a soccer net, another finds the ball blueprint, someone else adds a snack stand on the sideline, and a soccer match appears because players chose to build things that interact.

How we built it

Initially I used ChatGPT to brainstorm and discuss what I wanted out of this project. I fed ChatGPT the guidelines and templates to make sure my ideas fit the criteria the judges were looking for. I then wrote a baseline GDD myself to have some core truth that was concise and in my own language. I then setup all my own files along with the guidelines, templates, and pressure checklists that were provided by Meta into a single project on my local machine using Claude Terminal. I then used Claude Terminal to iterate over my deliverables to make sure it was hitting everything Meta wanted. For the images I used photoshop to get the elements and composition I wanted then I used Nano Banana to make the perspective and art style more cohesive. I then used a combination of Photoshop and Nano Banana to add the UI on top of the gameplay images.