Golf, But Hole was developed for the Game Maker’s Toolkit Game Jam 2023 with the theme “Roles Reversed”, by a team of 3 optimistic individuals, me, PwnJustRight, and SeeYu. The game takes the regular tactical sport of mini-golf, and flips it on its head, relying on your hole position to play. While most of the principles of mini-golf still apply, this role reversal means that this game has to be played…somewhat differently.

In this version of mini golf, players must manoeuvre a hole into position for the AI-controlled putter to put the ball into the hole. The putter aims every shot towards the hole, and adjusts its power based on the distance to the hole.

Highlights

Technical Art: Hole Cutout Shader

One of the biggest problems I had to deal with was to make a circular cutout in the ground to reveal the interior of the hole, and had to be moved. This was eventually done using a spherical distance measured from the targeted world position and cut out from the alpha of the final output. Due to the transparent nature of the shader for this to happen, however, I had to design the 3D mesh carefully for each piece of the level to reduce visual artifacts. The actual depth and interior of the hole was made by sticking a 3D model to said hole position.

Technical Art: Others

I also handled the scrolling arrow effect on the booster pads, the indicator circle (which was a textured gradient cylinder), and the height fog that surrounds each level. I’m pretty happy with the overall visual atmosphere! On the camera side of things, I also did the cool zoom-out level transitions by playing with the Cinemachine Virtual Camera’s FOV slider.

Art and Sound Design

Most of the art assets except for the skybox, the golf club and the flag, and all the SFX were done by me with a combination of Autodesk Maya 2023 and FL Studio 21. I am particularly fond of the sound effect caused when the ball drops into the hole, because that was made in a hurry by dropping ice cubes into a ceramic mug, and then adding some reverb in post. I have to give credit to my friends though, because they were the ones who put the pieces to good use to create most of the interesting levels that you see throughout the game!

UI Design: Scorecard

Designing the scorecard at the end of each level was done hastily by me in the last few hours of the jam. Inspired by real life golf scorecards, I made full use of Unity’s UI layout group components to quickly structure a table that should in theory work across multiple screen sizes, then tied it to the stroke counter in game and added the buttons after. This was the most complex piece of UI in the entire game.