Tag: golf gameplay

Golf Club Selection

Golf Club Selection

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

I’ve finished implementing the new golf club selection panel for Boss Golf!

Take a gander!

club_selector_update

The selection of clubs is based on the golf clubs in the golfer’s bag. As it is now, you’ll start off with a wood driver, irons 2 through 9, a pitching wedge, a lobbing wedge, a sand wedge, and a putter. Later on you’ll be able to select your own clubs and whatnot. I’ve removed the curving feature for now, as it wasn’t adding much to the game. But it will be brought back later on.

I’ve also added another panel for keeping track of your progress along the current hole you’re playing, telling you the remaining distance, what the par is, how many strokes you took so far etc.

All that’s left before 0.5 is adding the better idling behavior for the AI, and fixing up a couple of issues that were brought up by our testers, so that 0.5 will be a nice overall improvement. Should be released this Sunday (March 11th).

That’s all for now, folks!

Assuming Control of Decorations

Assuming Control of Decorations

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

Today’s update is one of the last big ones for 0.4! And it’s about Decorations in Boss Golf!

As you remember form the beginning of this update cycle, I mentioned how I wanted to take a turn to slow things down in the game. As part of that, I created a new system for placing the tiles, whereas the little landscaping guy would go and place the tiles after you finished setting up and approving your order. (If you need a refresh, you can read about it here!

Of course, this wasn’t going to be limited just to the tiles! Same will apply to buildings, facilities and, of course, decorations! In 0.3, you are able to place trees like you would any tile. Continue clicking and more trees will appear, and their position is randomized. You could also drag over a large area and place a bazillion trees at once.

This capability will be maintained in the scenario editor, where you will want broader strokes when building a scenario.

For the regular game, though, slowing things down is necessary. As such, I’ve altered the decoration system to bring you more freedom of placement, and work it into the current landscaping system.

For most decoration pieces, you the manager will place down the markers for where you want that decoration to be. Then the little landscaper that could will come and plop them down for you! As below:

placing_trees

So now you can place your decoration anywhere. Well, mostly. But feedback can always change one’s mind! But this will give you enough flexibility to really beautify your course. And you’ll be able to see your course grow over time and whatnot. Later on also planning on adding the possibility of moving a piece of decoration you placed, so that you don’t need to pay the extreme fees for new trees and whatnot. Saving is caring!

Together with this, I revamped the order system to make it more modular, so that I can more easily expand to accommodate different types of orders and whatnot, and revamped the decoration system to also make it more modular, with an eye for modding potential in the future.

All in all, a solid update. Now I need to readjust the save files to take into account the new changes, and 0.4 should be delivered to you guys soon!

(And if you haven’t signed up for the closed alpha, do so here! You kind folks who support the game at this stage will have some goodies and bonuses for believing in Boss Golf!)

That’s all for today, folks! Stay tuned for 0.4!

Billy Golf is back!

Billy Golf is back!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

Billy Golf is now back in action! The character will now once again move to the ball, prepare himself, and take the shot. I’ve added a handful of new states to the state machine, to delegate the golf gameplay to the golfer. Now you will prepare the shot, and the little dude will move to the ball and execute it. Look at him go!

stepOne

step2

step3

Funnily, the first couple of times he approached the ball too close, and the ball ended up colliding with himself on the way to the hole haha. But that’s been fixed. For now. Can easily be unfixed too, perhaps for some easter eggs, such as an extremely clumsy golfer.

And some of the more eagle eyed among you may have noticed a couple of other characters hanging around the golf course. I’ve added a handful of AI golfers to make things seem more lively, and will be hooking them up to the state machine this week. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get alpha 0.2 done, so that you can play the game with better golf gameplay, and see little AI people milling about your course. Hopefully also can get some walls in to separate your owned land from the rest of the land too.

We’ll see!

Stay tuned for more and thanks for reading!

Striking is integrated!

Striking is integrated!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

I’ve finished the reintegration of the new striking physics back into the game! Now you are again able to build up your hole and play it to your hearts desire.

madness

madness2

madness3

Next up is changing the physical attributes of the ball depending on the surface it is rolling on, and adding the rotational forces back in from the curve maker. This weekend I will update the alpha build to contain the shooting mechanics back.

Then it’s back to AI!

Oh and later on I’ll elaborate on the plan for the alpha, and a bit more on the scope of the game.

Stay tuned!

Golf Gameplay: Character Automatic Movement

Golf Gameplay: Character Automatic Movement

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

For today’s golf gameplay-related dev update, I’ve added automatic movement to the character, for reaching the ball and sort of positioning himself to take the shot!

It was easier than expected, thanks to some foresight of past Gus when coding the game. I simply moved the function to shoot the ball away from instantaneous execution after releasing the mouse button over the desired location, and put it in another action executed by the golfer character once it has reached the calculated point of shooting.

This calculation is a bit dirty now, as it only tries to get position slightly away from the ball and perpendicular to the direction from the ball to the desired target. For the current prototyping purposes it works.

The golfer also slightly delay the shot when he arrives in position, in order to “think” about how to hit the ball. I’ll add some animations and fluff to this step later.

You can see the execution of a hole with the new system below:

Golfer walks to the tee and drives the ball.
Golfer teeing off!

 

Chip shot on the edge of the bunker
Chipping it in closer to the green!

 

Little golfer chips it home for a par.
Sweet chip in, Payne!

And that’s it for today’s update on golf gameplay! Still need to automate the moving to the ball more, so that the doesn’t wait for your to finish deciding on the stroke before taking position. And the shot visualizer thing is still broken, giving out NaN results depending on the slope. I’ll make a better fix for that later!

That’s all, folks! Keep on teeing! And may your strokes never slice!

(Also, starting from today, I’ll drop the numbered update from the format and put in a more relevant title off the bat. This will give you, readers, a quicker idea of what the feature is relevant to straight off the title. Categories like Golf Gameplay, Tycoon Gameplay, Management Gameplay etc will make it easier for navigation!)

Dev Update #36: Basic Stroke Maker is In!

Dev Update #36: Basic Stroke Maker is In!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

Finished implementing the basic version of the stroke maker!

It now allows you to curve your shots in sort of the way you want it. To illustrate the process, I created a simple tiled hole so that you can better see the path created by the ball before and after the shot.

Below, you can see a top before/after view of hitting the ball off the tee:

On the left side, it’s the straight predicted trajectory of the ball (currently not taking into account the spin on the display!), and on the right is the result of the stroke. As per the stroke maker, you can see I went full on right-spin on it. You shouldn’t do that unless you really want it the spin. In this case, it deviated only slightly to the left.

Here, the ensuing shot, a chip in from a distance:

Again, full on spinning. It resulted in a nice curve cutting inside towards the center of the field. Just for displaying purposes, of course.

Finally, my attempt at putting with a curve because why not?

All of that was on flat ground, to make sure the curving calibration wasn’t affected by any other effects. Dang close from the hole too, if I had aimed just a tad more to the left, it would have gone in. But oh well, live and learn!

This doesn’t conclude the UI implementation yet; I still need to hook up the end state of the goal/retire option to it, as well as add more info regarding the stroke you’re taking, plus information on the hole and how far along you are. After, I’ll make some more icons for the terrain editing part, ensure everything is navigable, and that you can cancel your actions.

Then I’ll move on to AI, hopefully!

That’s all for now folks!

Demo has been updated!

Demo has been updated!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

As detailed in the previous Quickie, I’ve updated the Boss Golf demo to bring it to  version 0.04 of the Terrain and Drive demo!

As below you can download it Here!

The focus of this demo was on quality of life improvements and bug fixing. The ball deceleration/bouncing now works as expected, trails and shadows were improved, and I added some particles to make the game feel more polished! This is what happens when you drive:

Drive_Particle

And this is an awesome chip shot I performed, got painstakingly close to the hole too!

NiceChip

And even some water particles! (Only on the water you’ve placed, though! The system needs to be reworked a bit to sync with the water outside the build area)

Water Hazard

So there you go! Gameplay is getting nicer and nicer. One of these days I wanna sit down and make a video showing how to build a nice hole. And do it Bob Ross style, with trees and hills and rivers! So there’s something to look forward to!

Next week will be focused on more polishing and weeding out some bugs, as well as improving the UI. Perhaps I’ll even add paths and bridges! We’ll see!

For now, enjoy the demo! Don’t forget to drop by our subreddit to give us your feedback, and don’t forget to like our Facebook page!

Have a nice weekend!

Quickie: Anatomy of a Hole

Quickie: Anatomy of a Hole

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

I’ve finished the work I wanted done for this week. In fact, I’ll be releasing the new demo in a couple of minutes!

Now, the goal of this post is to show you how to play your awesomely create hole.

For that, I created this demo hole: Double Trouble

Here’s an overview of what the hole looks like:

double_trouble

The two little bodies of water in the middle add to the difficulty. The sand trap surrounding it is more for psychological terror, as they’re actually quite flat. Opposite of the fairway, which is angled all over the place, specially aimed to make you fall on the water. So to start off the drive, I aimed my shot in this direction:

stroke_one

My intention was to bypass the slope with speed and make it safely to the end of the fairway. But it actually happened much better! The ball bounced majestically off of the fairway, and ended up really near the green, albeit in a bunker:

stroke_two

From there, though, it was a short chip in to get on the green and be on a good position. This course was a par 4. This shot would put me at 2 strokes, with a potentially straightforward putt to help me to an Birdie. Which is what I did, since my chip in landed around here:

stroke_three

Extremely close. Like, way too close. The kind of close shot I’ve missed before because I forgot to account for slopes and stuff! This time around, I sank it like a champ!

All of this was thanks to a very lucky drive! I was not expecting it to bounce the way it did, but I was very pleased for it!

Well that’s that! Stay tuned for the new demo for Boss Golf!

Quickie: Quality of Life Improvement

Quickie: Quality of Life Improvement

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Heyo folks!

Today I spent some time ironing out a bug with the collision detection, where depending on the speed of the ball it would simply go through the terrain.

That looks fixed enough! Of course, should it happen to you after this weekend’s demo, please let me know!

Still smoothing out the new physics set up. And learning how to play my own game! Turns out sometimes you really don’t want to go full force, as seen below:

Failed_Shot

Or even medium force:

failed_shot_2

Finally, was able to do it!

quality2

Next, I wanna add some trail particles for when the ball is moving on terrain, so that you can more accurately detect the path the ball took. Plus some particle effects to make things look a tad more polished!

That’s all for today’s quickie, folks!

Dev Update #33: Shooting Improvements

Dev Update #33: Shooting Improvements

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Heyo folks!

I’ve tweaked the rolling resistance settings, and fixed the settings for bouncing. Now the ball will bounce a lot less on sand, but more on harder surfaces. So now Boss Golf has better golf playing gameplay, woohoo!

I’ve also gone ahead and improved the display of the shot, added a faux-shadow to it so you can have better sense of depth regarding where your shot is supposed to hit!

shoot_improvement

Also made sure to make the lines render above everything else, so you can always know how your shot will handle.

As you can see, I also removed the circle that was at the end area. This will be readded later when golfer attributes are in, so that you’ll have a rough idea of where you want your shot to be, and the circle will describe the potential landing areas based on your attributes.

However, I still fail at playing golf:

Shot_Improvement

I did have tremendous fun just playing around while tweaking the shots and stuff. This is a good sign I hope!

OH! And found a but with the putting system, where it pushes the ball way too hard for its own good, ending up with some hilarious consequences.

That’s all for today folks!