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Coconut Isle

A colorful, cute and challenging 2.5D platformer where the young pirate Maxie sets out to find the treasure of Coconut Isle. Developed over the course of 8 weeks with students at The Game Assembly in Malmö using their in-house game engine.

In this project, I am responsible for the design and production of everything the player will hear - from sound effects and ambience to music, voice and cutscenes.

This game was my introduction to using FMOD Studio as a middleware, and the creative possibilities and improved workflow it provides is something i appreciate greatly.

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Sound design

The sounds in Coconut Isle aim to engage the player in the fun and light-hearted adventure. It is important to me that the sounds give good feedback and that they match the pacing and atmosphere of both gameplay and aesthetics. The focus here was not on realism or complexity, but rather bringing out the fun in every little interaction. Super Mario games were a big inspiration in this sense.

Checkpoint
00:00 / 00:05
CoconutCrab Bonk
00:00 / 00:02
Open Chest
00:00 / 00:03
Player Death
00:00 / 00:05

Voice design

Giving Maxie and Goose - the player character and their parrot companion - voices was crucial in making them feel like characters with emotions and personalities. The game doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but I still put great effort into making the dialogue sounds.

I convinced my friend and programmer on the team to make her voice acting debut as Maxie, and we recorded many short vocal expressions that I categorized into emotions such as "happy, angry, agreeing, wondering". I then assigned every text box one of these emotions, based on the game's script. This system was inspired by games like Celeste and The Legend of Zelda.


This philosophy also carried over to the non-dialogue voice design. Jumping, landing, taking damage and dying all have voice expressions with many variations, to make Maxie feel like a natural human being.

Music

Main/Menu ThemeAlbin Wrede
00:00 / 01:57
Shipwreck ShoreAlbin Wrede
00:00 / 02:53
Treacherous TropicsAlbin Wrede
00:00 / 02:30
Crystal CavernAlbin Wrede
00:00 / 02:06

Much like the sound design, the main goal of the music was to engage the player in the fast-paced platforming fun, rather than aiming for realism by using complex systems. It is mainly inspired by Donkey Kong Country, but also has influences from Pirates of the Caribbean and Sonic Unleashed.

The Soundtrack gives character to every level and enhances their unique environments. The beach level utilizes steel drums, marimba and guitar, the jungle level features a lot of tribal drums, brass and violin and the crystal caverns is more dark and heavy while still having a "crystal-like" melody.

In my own opinion, the soundtrack for Coconut Isle is some of the best music I've made.

A fun little "hidden" adaptive element that many players will miss: If Maxie stands still for long enough, she will start whistling in tune with the music!

Cutscenes

Intro

Ending

This cutscene was changed at a later point, so it is shorter and some sounds are missing

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