The first round of grolf

Version 1.0 of Grolf is finally finished! I say "finally" even though I've been working on this for all of one month as part of the Physics Game project in Studio I. But finishing took the form of separate stages: the version I showed my class two weeks ago only had 9 holes, a clunkier UI and major bugs, and little in the way of QoL improvements. With an additional two weeks, I've managed to get this to a fairly polished place.

The original concept I played with for this project was a pinball prototype. I've been toying around with the idea of a roguelike where you build a pinball machine over time and need increasingly ludicrous multiballs and combos to pass on to the next section. But of course, it was waay overscoped for a class project, and the earliest prototypes were clunky and flat. I switched to a simple golf controller and experimented with having a putting mechanic that only enabled you to shoot the ball once it had rolled to a complete stop. (I never quite got that "complete" part down, largely because it was better to give the player more control to shoot their ball mid-roll.)

After seeing Karina Popp's lecture about "Video Dolls" and the non-gamey ways in which people play with video games, I started to think more about non-embodied forms of play. In talking about this with Virginia, she was saying there should be more games where you don't just control the player but also the environment, the setting, the context. I thought this sounded good, and I immediately went to my golf prototype and added some controls for rotating the scene in addition to the ball. At this point, I still had things like pinball bumpers in my game, and the earliest rotations went smoothly around in a circle in a way that felt uncontrolled.

After removing the glitchy bumpers and making the gravity rotation discrete, I knew I had a pretty fun little puzzle-golf game on my hands. The first level was where I did the bulk of my gameplay coding: I added strokes for the putts AND gravity and made a level where you needed to use both to advance. From there, level design was fairly smooth: I ideated in a sketchbook or Asesprite, then tested a prototype in a TileMap. After finalizing a layout, I'd duplicate the TileMap and modify it to be all black (off-black) as a drop shadow (this was one of many great tips courtesy of Jon Topielski.) Eventually I fiddled quite a lot with UI, and added level titles and a score counter.

There are still a fair number of bugs -- I never quite solved the collision detection problems I was having, so every TileMap collider is backed up by hand-drawn StaticBody colliders which seemed to detect my RigidBody ball better. (Shoutout here to BitGreen1270 on r/godot who built an entire prototype to show me how move_and_collide() might work for me -- you tried, I failed.) I never added a spring platform or a score dropdown or a lot of other little nice things. BUT! My games are starting to look those from the people who inspired me when I first started to learn Godot: Edgar Mendoza, Stuffed Wombat, Macrow, and more. That's a pretty good feeling and I'm happy with where things are headed.