27th June 2017

As each game is released, and player comments are posted, I'll try my best to make these posts as complete as I can.
Feel free to leave your own comments, and I'll add them to the pile.

This week, player's thoughts on Thwackity Puttz

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Pakz

I played two holes. It was not easy to find where to shoot the ball to(no minimap?) I also went out looking for trolls in the forest but found none.
I did hit a birdy though.

I honestly didn't think a minimap was necessary. With the added ability of wandering around, it was easy enough for me to plan a route to hit the ball.
If anyone else feels it could do with a minimap, be sure to let me know.

There was no music in the game(html5) The sound effects worked though.

GameJolt's server doesn't seem to be able to serve the fairly large (2.5Mb) MP3 in time to play it.. Or maybe it looks at the size of it and goes "No thanks!!"
As such, even though the music is coded to play, it just simply doesn't!
If you need music, you'll have to grab the Win.exe instead, I'm afraid..

RSKGames

Completed all the 9 courses and even managed to keep 2 high scores on the way. A brilliant game with the right amount of difficulty to keep it engaging.

Indeed. Even I bothered to play through them all!!
Usually I get quite bored with a golf game, so when I'm forced to play through an 18-hole course, I tend to give up halfway through.
But this game is nice and fast paced, and I was able to actually enjoy each hole.

Gameplay: During the initial 4 to 5 courses I was not hitting the ball far enough. Once I figured it out, I was over shooting. Clicking the "Z" key the second time when the bar is going just above the mid point seems to work for hitting the ball far. I guess the controls are set to make the game not too easy or not too difficult, very well balanced.

I tried to make it as simple as possible. Tap once, tap again.
I think I've maybe made it a bit "too" hard to hit a full-thwack, as it's incredibly difficult to tap it right at the top of the bar.
Perhaps in future it might be better to move the power bar up and down, instead of resetting it back to 0 when it hits the top?

I've also made it so that you need different amounts of power depending on the type of grass the ball's lying in. Hopefully this is obvious enough to the player!

Seeing the grass layout and the position of the birds, it became easier to spot the direction of the hole with respect to the ball.

Yeah, the generator tries to follow a nice curve so that the clumps of "fairway" lead in to each other.
Another fairly nice random generator!

Fun fact : This week's game was originally going to be a Marble Madness style "guide the ball around the level without falling off" sort of thing, but as soon as I noticed the clumped circular nature of the generator's levels, it became obvious that it was going to be a Golf game, instead!

Graphics: All the three themes look beautiful. I liked the brown trees and grass theme. The circle rotating effect around the ball is nicely done and helps keep track of the ball position. I went far from the ball and went beyond the tress to get plain grass fields.

Aaah, those trees!
Originally designed last year, the tree generator's sourcecode is available here.
Runs in BlitzMax and makes many a tree!
I've used the trees a number of times, since, and they really do make things look nice and pretty!

The circular ball-finder was a necessity since, without a minimap, it was fairly easy to lose your ball.
It's also possible for the ball to land behind a tree's sprite, thus making it impossible to see it.
The circular "finder" helps both of these issues, and it's a nice little effect, too!

Scoring: Very fair scoring. Deliberately trying to hit the eagle or the pelican to score more lead to lot of trouble with reflected balls going into the trees. So tried to take the shortest path to the hole through the tress with as few h its per hole. Mostly it worked. Keeping the online scoreboard and local scoreboard away from the HUD lead to a more relaxing game.

The Birdie and Eagle were in mind from the start of the project. I knew that with the "inverted" scoring, that a normal Par system wouldn't really work, so the idea of hitting an Eagle/Birdie seemed fairly logical.
I'm quite happy with the way the scores turned out, and hopefully they'll make for a nice varied selection of online scores.

Title & sound: The main title as well the eagle, or bird hit message along with game over and hole complete messages are artfully done. Music is suiting the pace of the game. Sound ball hitting the hole felt satisfying.

"Artfully"! A word rarely used when describing my games!
A quick search at 1001Fonts for Golf leads directly to the font in question. "I suck at Golf"!!
The logo and other bits and pieces were done simply by drawing the font and adding a border. then a bit of drop-shadow.
There really isn't anything complicated, there, but it did look nice, so... Yeay!

The music was very very last minute, and is a simple remix/rearrangement/reinstrumentation of Liquid Xigua, with a lot more repetition and a bit of variety along the way.
Having searched through both my own archive and the Incompetech archive, I just couldn't find the right tune. Instead, I headed in, grabbed something that was fairly usable, and rejigged it to fit the style of the game.

Overall a very brilliantly executed game.

Thanks!
I'm now very tempted to iOS the game up a bit..
Hmm...

Views 176, Upvotes 26

Player Thoughts

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