GOLF HERO

Storyline
Start screen
How to play
Hole 1
Scorecard

When I was wasting away in my room in 2021 quarantine, I found a light shining through the ubiquitous darkness. Golf. Golf is meditation, exercise, good chats with friends, competition, heartbreak and glory all in one.

Golf Hero allows you to travel through 1/9 of a 9 hole golf course, weaving through obstacles, water and difficult angles to try and get to the flag. "On the edge" was the genesis of our creativity, inspiring us physically, mentally, politically, economically and socially. Our lonely little golf ball is mentally on the edge, as he has just gone through a recent heartbreak. Furthermore, the music and infinite potential of what the game might become also puts the user right on the "edge" of their seat. Finally, the ball falls of edge many, many times. So yeh.

We built the game using python, utilising the pygame module for our GUI. Having never used pygame before, we spent the first half of the game jam exploring the basic functions and methods within the module. Then we decided to design and build a 2-D golf game. We shared code through GitHub and met on zoom to discuss ideas, plan, allocate roles and help each other.

As beginner pygame users, this was a challenging task to complete within a 2 day time frame. We were ambitious about our goals for the game, which I think was a positive mindset to have, but it meant that we later had to accept that we would not be able to achieve everything we wanted to. For example the game is currently limited to 1 level and two surfaces, where as we had hoped to implement multiple levels and add interesting surfaces such as sand and out-of-bounds. We also battled with the physics of projectile motion and collisions in pygame, consistently dealing with bugs.

We are proud of the positive mindset and team work with which we approached this task, and we feel like we learnt a heck of a lot about game design and development. We are also pleased with the appearance of the game, specifically the flag.

As mentioned, we had many goals for the game that we couldn't quite implement by the deadline, and we're excited to add to the game after the game jam is finished. We hope to add themes (jungle, beach, desert) and new levels to the game, as well as interesting surfaces like sand and water. Nifty little things like power-ups are also in the works.