• hbdeveloper
• On November 27, 2014

After the sickness of last week we’ve nearly got a full bill of health this week. So it’s back to full speed ahead for the team now. The feedback on the forums last week, after the announcement of the Countryside Theme, was really positive. We’ve got some great themes lined up for the next 4 months as well so don’t despair just yet if you’re not seeing the theme you’d like! The ability to remove the golf bags and edit the tee markers also went down a storm. Paul has been so excited about the resulting offer of marriage from tastegw that he spent the weekend looking for suits.

If you don’t follow us on Twitter, you really should, you would have missed a couple of videos that went up. We’ve been experimenting with the engine for another prototype and quickly got the golfer running around and used the Golf Cart for a driving test last week. This isn’t likely to migrate to The Golf Club but it is fun to see such familiar assets in a different context.

We’ve also been showing off our Movember efforts

Mine – https://twitter.com/thegolfclubgame/status/536956629384962048

Devon’s – https://twitter.com/thegolfclubgame/status/537306133468577792

PeiPei’s – https://twitter.com/thegolfclubgame/status/538036410239168512

The guys have finished 80% of the Handicap System implementation this week which means myself and the team can start testing it out and fine tuning the experience. The feedback to the player needs to be right and it needs to feel an integral part of the game because the last thing we want is a feature that feels like it’s been tacked on the side of the game. We’ll be focusing on this right up to submission of Feature Update 2.

We’ve also made some big headway on optimisation on both console and PC. As an example, the user-created course Isla Medeliena was a particularly slow creation on the PS4 – running at around 10-12fps. With the improvements we’ve added it’s now running between 20 and 25fps. With another few days set aside of this work, this number should only go up.

After the ‘straight shooters’ debate of last week, I just wanted to let you know that we’re still in discussions about this and the best way to deal with it. I actually posted on the Operation Sports forums about it earlier in the week. Yes, I’m a big fan of creating an even playing field and creating a straight shooters leaderboard would go some way to achieving this but, as game designers striving to create a realistic golf experience, we are very keen to see if our Handicap System can achieve the desired result first. What we are all after is a level playing field and the theory behind any handicap system is an attempt to achieve just that. Along with the handicap system will come the capability of fixing tournament entry levels so that a maximum / minimum handicap can be set and, also, then setting whether handicaps are taken into account once entered which should make tournaments much more enticing. We have great long term belief in our tournaments and tours. When you actually take part in a TGC tournament with players of a similar skill level it is a very exciting experience and being able to set the entry kill level with Feature Update 2 should enable everyone to experience this.

Cheers
Anthony