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With all the golf video games out there, I wouldn't consider making a full game just about golf. But a dungeon golf minigame in my action-adventure game? No objections, right? A quick technical and game design recap 🧵

When designing levels, I focused on easy readability for players, variety, and variable verticality. The shapes of the levels were all created in Blender using simple cubes and textured with triplanar texturing.

I created the classic grass pattern using a repeating grass texture and texture layering. The second layer, a simple gray-and-white checkerboard texture, is multiplied onto the base texture with a transparency value.

Since it's a simple minigame, there are only simple obstacles. There are static barricades that players can use to their advantage or navigate around. There are also dynamic simple shape rigidbody based obstacles with spectral visuals. Moving obstacles also leave a slight trail.

For the golf courses, I primarily use baked lighting cause it looks awesome and fits well. But I also add realtime lights for the torches to create dynamic shadows for the golf ball and obstacles.

In addition to the realtime lights, I'm using the third-party asset Fake Point Lights by LazyEti. This lets me project stylized, beautiful Wind Waker-like light cones with sharp edges onto the environment.

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Since there are occasionally some darker spots on the golf courses, the golf ball also has a weak light source. The goal was to improve visibility for the player.

The HUD is minimalist. Shot direction follows the camera's view, and the power meter only pops up when you hold the strike button.

I'm from Germany and typical old German names are kinda a meme here. But somehow, some of these names have their own unique vibe. All shopkeepers in the game are part of an old merchant family and have first names like Albrecht or Gottfried.

For the golf minigame, the main character has a special golf outfit. But since you don't actually see the character in the minigame, just in a short cutscene, it was basically wasted work time 🤣