• hbdeveloper
• On February 19, 2015

Season Mode is slowly falling into place and like I said last week, it’s an enjoyable time in development for us as we get to play and tweak the game in small amounts while the coders get more and more frustrated at me for changing my mind! It’s one of the reasons you need great team spirit and a team focused on the end goal. We’re lucky we have that here, so everybody is pushing for the greater good and I truly hope that it shines through in each update we push out to you guys.

Right now we’re trying to get the whole core “loop” of Season Mode to work together as a cohesive experience – so this means making sure that leaderboards are always accurate, popups let users know what they need to know at any given point, and that during the matches John keeps you up-to-date with your progress through the season and your quest for silverware!

We’ve also started testing the mode externally this week as well. The guys we use for QA are great and we’ve had a good relationship with them over the last 4 or more years. They love the game as well, so they were eager to get their eyes on some of the new stuff that has gone in. One of the realities of console development is that even though it will be a while before you guys can get your hands on the game – we’re actually really close to being finished!

The other big thing this week is that Peter is finishing his talk for GDC which is focused on The Golf Club.  He’s going to be doing a really interesting talk called “Reimagining Simulation Sports as an Independent Developer” going through the ins and outs of how we as a smaller developer went about making a game within a budget that would be good enough to compete with the huge licensed products that had come before. It’s looking at how we had to come at it from a different angle to open up the market with things like the procedural course generation, user generated content, cross platform sharing and the integration of you guys in the community to help build a better game.

One of the things we’ve always said is that rather than competing directly with other titles in this space, we’re instead offering a novel experience. That hopefully becomes apparent when you look at features like the Greg Norman Course Designer, asynchronous multiplayer and the heavy focus on social sharing. Keeping that focus on innovation is key to our ability to compete in that space and to offer something that’s not available in other games.

It’s a really interesting subject and something that, if I wasn’t part of it every day, I’d be going to listen to it at GDC in a few weeks.

Next week I’ll have some exciting announcements and more details on the upcoming features in the next dev diary!

Thanks

Anthony