The Cocoknight was developed in 2020 by local Burlington studio Rad Magpie in a partnership with Make-A-Wish Vermont to fulfill a child’s wish. Rad Magpie organized a small team to develop the initial concept with guidance from Mika, the Wish Kid herself. I joined the team as a systems, combat, and level designer. The Cocoknight presented a variety of obstacles, and I took significant lessons away from both my and the team’s success in overcoming these challenges.
Lessons in Team Scale
By far the greatest challenge I faced on The Cocoknight was tight timelines, especially when greyboxing, tuning, and polishing the game’s three levels. Full production began in June 2020 and ended in late August; as such, we had only a few months to deliver the promised length and depth of gameplay. The game’s challenging but approachable combat and engaging environments are a testament to the team’s dedication to delivering Mika the game she had dreamed up.
My Process
Working within these conditions, I knew I had to adjust my development process accordingly. Once the team settled upon our three level concepts, I dove head-first into sketching and greyboxing. My inward-facing documents were incredibly rough, as they were only needed to communicate environment direction to the team’s artist — rapidly creating play spaces to ensure the rest of the team had the needed time to work took priority.
Combat design was a largely collaborative effort. I met often with our gameplay engineer to discuss the player’s combat toolset, and together we developed a melee/ranged/shield trifecta. In addition, we designed approximately half a dozen enemy types with unique attack options requiring different tactics from the player in order to fight optimally.
Pipelines
I created greyboxes for the three levels in Unity using ProBuilder and exported them to the team’s artist; once I received the level with environment art applied, I adjusted placements of rocks, trees, and other elements in the environment, as well as placing enemies, coconuts to rescue, and player pickups. Lastly, I ensured the player couldn’t escape the level geometry by meticulously testing and adjusting colliders.
For combat design, Mika served as our starting point for both enemy and player ability designs. She pitched the basic mechanics and rough visual concepts, and the team determined how to best fit these pieces together, starting with rough prototypes and eventually building in polished visuals and sounds for Mika’s final approval.
The Takeaway
Working on The Cocoknight was an exercise in overcoming numerous development setbacks and still managing to impress a client. The Cocoknight isn’t perfect — I would have loved more time to iterate on combat feedback, level layouts, and more. Regardless, Mika was incredibly receptive to all of our work, and the entire team is proud of the final project.