• hbdeveloper
• On November 13, 2014

As promised last week, these Dev Diaries are now going weekly. These will hopefully keep you informed as to what the team are up to on a regular basis. I remember reading The One Magazine during the development of Sensible World Of Soccer and the great Development Diaries that they used to have in each edition. I’m hoping these diaries will be as eagerly awaited!!

Last week I said that we’d be mainly concentrating on the Handicap System for the next update (See Peipei, Bryan and Mitchell discussing the work they need to do in the photo below), reading the forums some of you guys feel we should be concentrating our efforts elsewhere. We understand that, but the Handicap System will fit into systems like Career Mode that will be introduced in the future. To make Career Mode enjoyable off the bat, we feel that having the core of the community on a handicap that will represent their ability will make the Career mode more enjoyable immediately. So bear with us while we take a bit of time to get this in. I’m sure you’ll all have plenty of feedback once we release it and it would be nice to get any teething issues out of the way before you would actually have to play a season.

TGC team members in Handicap System planning

Something else we’ve added is Stableford Rules. Devon started it last week and spent a bit of time with John ‘The Voice’ McCarthy planning out some audio for it. Stableford is my favourite scoring system in golf. I’m not a great player in real life and it means that one blowout hole doesn’t ruin the round. For the weaker virtual players it will give them the opportunity to compete against the stronger players in the community especially when used in conjunction with the Handicap System.

The last thing that we’ve spent a lot of the week talking about is “Straight Shooters”. It’s as hot of a topic in the studio as it is on the forums. We record every round and we know who has augmented their controllers to help them shoot straight majority of the time. Our problem is what to do with that information. The people who do it enjoy the game, so we don’t want to ban them. Some people even do it due to disabilities which is completely understandable. They enjoy playing that way in the same way that some players love to hit -21 on Little Brook Manor rather than challenge themselves on some tougher courses. Who are we to tell people how to play our game?

On the other side of the coin though why should people, who do not augment their controllers, be basically unable to compete in Leaderboards, Tours and Tournaments. This is the debate! The best solution we can think of at the moment is to have separate leaderboards for people that want to play that way. It would be great to hear what you guys think about it, so go to the Forum and let the discussions begin.

Cheers
Anthony