• hbdeveloper
• On January 22, 2015

Another busy week at The Golf Club Headquarters. The team has been planning out and starting the tasks for the forthcoming Season Mode (working title). It’s a reasonable amount of work in a short amount of time but something that will really improve the replay-ability of the game. We’re also looking into some other features that seem to be big asks from the community, Out of Bounds and Drop Ball being 2 of them. None of these are simple tasks but something we’re very keen on giving designers and players alike.

Retaining walls are being researched. (Work in progress screenshot).

On the art side we are going to be making some additions to the Greg Norman Course Designer assets. We play a lot of the community created courses and are always amazed at the imagination shown by designers when it comes to creating the desired look for your courses. Benches for steps, bridges for retaining walls, tree stumps for walls, etc. This week, Jim has taken a quick look at creating some of these things for you. They’re looking really good, so I’m very excited to see your creations with these new objects. And a quick reminder that not everyone on the team codes, thus, when you see something like rain being investigated it doesn’t mean time is being taken away from some other ‘essential’ addition or ‘must fix’ area of the game. Just like me writing this isn’t getting in the way of the programming for Out of Bounds.

We managed to push the PS4 patch live last weekend, and it seems to have gone across well. Microsoft pushed the Xbox One build live yesterday. Sony seem to assess the changes made to the game and test accordingly where as Microsoft give the whole thing a full test each time. That’s why the Xbox One version was later than others.

A lot of you have noticed that we’ve improved the putting swing in this patch. It’s not a big change but really helps the system. It was really helpful to have the feedback on the forums beforehand and the response subsequently has been mostly positive. Obviously players get used to the way something works after using it for a long time but we feel confident that the tweaks are for the best and that people will adapt after a few rounds.

I did another Twitch broadcast yesterday. It was a great experience, even though Lorin whipped me. I might try and get another one of the team to do it next week, maybe doing a course creation tutorial or something, it would be nice to change it up a bit and keep it fresh and interesting. So if you have any ideas let us know on the forum.

One of the big talking points in the studio this week has been Handicapped tournaments, we believe the Tours and Tournaments are a marquee feature of the game and something that can really bring out the competitiveness in players. Pre-handicap system, the tournaments were basically only for the elite, which wasn’t something we wanted. They should be playable and competitive for all. With the Handicap system in place we have found that some of tournaments on the easier courses skew a little in favour of the weaker players. We’re reviewing all the data regularly and as much as we want to stay true to the real life system we do understand that video game golf is a little different to real life golf. We are going to investigate a little and see what tweaks we can make to the base formulas to even the playing field a little more.

Thanks
Anthony