Cookie County

Bake Cookies. Warm Hearts. Save the City.

Cookie County Game Design Document: Cookie County GDD

My Contributions

1 / 6

I created our tutorial system which I have been improving on for the last year. This tutorial used a lot of gameplay flags to make it as interactive as possible, letting the player learn as they play. I also voiced the Cookie Colonel which made the tutorial far more engaging.

2 / 6

I created the lighting system used to turn on lights and also create snowmen when cookies are eaten near them. This mechanic seemed to resonate most with our playtesters and is integral to the core themes of the game.

3 / 6

As our frontend developer, almost everything shown on screen was assembled by me, including UI design, lighting, particles, post processing, and level design.

4 / 6

My favorite contribution was scripting all the NPC behavior. They all use a state machine where they wander until they are in range of cookies, and then they go seek the cookie. Every house acts a spawner for NPCs, and if enough NPCs return home after eating cookies, the house's lights will turn on.

5 / 6

I assembled our level design using tilesets provided by our artist. The idea here was to have a very closed in opening area that slowly opens up more as you explore. You must clear fog to expand the map, and explore to find new ingredients and upgrades. Iterating through different sketches helped me wind up with the final product shown here.

6 / 6

I scripted the Cookie Cannon which is what the player uses to shoot cookies at NPCs. This can be controlled by the scroll wheel or Q/E. Players can charge it up to shoot farther.

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Role: Game Designer, Level Designer, Programmer, Voice Actor, and Sound Designer
Tools: Unity 2D, Visual Studio, Audacity
Link: Play Cookie County on Itch.io

Key Takeaways:
This project was the result of taking all the feedback and lessons I learned from designing Babel in May of 2025, an idle clicker game, and really improving upon this style as a designer. We heard a lot of players say they felt the gameplay was a little boring in Babel, so I really wanted to give the player far more agency while sticking to a style of game I knew well, in order to make a polished product in 2 weeks. We were able to learn so much in the 8 months since making Babel, including libraries of reusable scripts we've written, that made Cookie County really come together with such ease.

Cookie County is a cozy, cookie-baking, clicker game that was made for thatgamejam #1 in 2 weeks. This was a very special project for me because we partnered with a friend, Isaac Hess, who handled all of our art direction. This freed me up to focus more on my development skills. With extra time on my hands, I was able to learn SO MUCH about coding NPC ai. I handled all the NPC logic by creating a custom state machine script that handled their behavior. I learned that the method I used was a little clunky in the end with NPCs getting stuck at times, and for my next project I will utilize Unity's Navmesh system to have better pathfinding.

In terms of my role as the lead designer, I think this was a very fulfilling project for me. I set out to flip the clicker/tycoon genre on its head by generating joy instead of money. All progression in the game is centered around cheering up your town by feeding cookies to NPCs and lighting up your city. The comments on the game jam were very encouraging because everyone seemed to really love the cozy vibe crafted by the gameplay and art direction. Having a dedicated artist for this game meant as the designer, I had to convey my vision through sketches and our design doc to the artist. This was very new to me, and we ran into a few hiccups where I didn't explain things well enough which resulted in having to ask our artist to modify assets. But I am so glad I got this experience, as I have vastly improved in sketching out my gameplay concepts, where in the past I just went ahead making the assets since I was our artist.