WHERE IT LANDS

Finding the Visual Metaphor

One of the elements that can guide the adoption to a game's mechanics for new players is a strong visual metaphor. If I am a Bear, I am going to want to do Bear things. I'm going to expect to be focused on food, sleep, and more food. Using this idea, we can align our visuals to our gameplay so the player immediately gets what their objective is. "I'm a bear, where is the nearest trash bin, river, or bee hive".

In this game, we are playing Mini Golf.

So what kind of visuals are going to really sell our idea? First I was playing with a little knight on a rollie horse and you would kind of joust at enemies. This was fun and silly but didn't end up feeling like the tone I wanted to capture. I was enjoying this idea of sneaking through the levels, playing Mini Golf while not getting caught. The next pass was this little Rogue you see here. I really loved this lil guy, and having a lil golf ball character felt very fitting. When setting up my enemies and building out the world though, I found it stiffling. Is EVERYONE a golf ball? Are enemies other basic shapes to counter the sphere hero?

There was an OBVIOUS answer that people kept recommending based on my history of pets and affinity for a 16bit classic.

I'm happy I tried other options before landing on playing as a little hedgehog character in a Redwall/Wind in the Willows type of world. Having explored options, this path felt the strongest. Ideas have easily fallen together, it just makes sense. True, hedgehogs don't actually roll around, but due to their rollie nature in popular culture, this is something the general player will understand.

In this current iteration you are a little Hedgehog, searching through the ruins of an old castle trying to free your family that has been captured. Sneak passed the Rat and Weasel denizens of the dungeon while solving puzzles and discovering the mysteries of what the Rats and Weasels are up to.

Anthropomorphic woodland critters is a lovely theme with classics like:

• Redwall
• Wind in the Willows
• Brambly Hedge
• Secret of NIMH
• Robin Hood

Getting Started

After this most recent layoff, I took a look at all of the game assets I have been hoarding over the years and all of the scripts I have created for my prototyping classes. I had everything I needed to make a mini golf dungeon crawler, something I have been kicking around in my notebooks for a few years

The initial golf system I had got from a unity holiday sale, and it was a great system to GET THE BALL ROLLING!! (I'll see myself out)

since I wanted the ball to be a character, I scaled the system up so the ball is a little over a meter. This way it feels at home in a normal human size environment while still feeling small and helpless

next I tried a few different approaches to what the levels and obstacles could be. All of them were too bound to "mini golf" though and just felt like I was reskinning mini golf. So I tried the opposite side of the description and leaned more into the dungeon crawler aspect of the idea. This is when everything REALLY started to settle into itself. Having enemies living in the dungeon that you have to sneak passed gives a nice sense of danger and risk as you move through the space

Currently I am working on bringing more of that mini golf back into the dungeon. Finding ways to add slopes, banked corners, verticality, any sort of fun adaptations to the space for a ball to interact with