The release of Goblin Rules Football has gone well! I’ve played 3v3 a few times with my friends and it’s been great! There are even positive reviews! Only for of them…but still, all positive! And none are from friends I begged to review to juice my numbers! Just random people who though my stupid little game was good I guess. Honestly, it makes me so happy just to see anyone care about GRF at all. Thanks to all my fans!
Since the release, I have been slowly working on a new mode I want to add to GRF: golf. Nothing to do with football or rugby, just golf. May need to rename the game to “Goblin Rules Sports” but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
While making GRF, I have played two 2d golf games that I really enjoyed: Golf Story and Cursed to Golf. Golf Story is an RPG game where you play golf and boost your golf stats. Its a switch game and I loved it when I played. It is played in a top down perspective similar to the gameboy version of Mario Golf. Cursed to Golf was released this year and is a golfing roguelite game that plays basically like a golf platformer (that is very hard and stressful). It’s in a side view perspective. Very different games, but both very fun!
I really wanted to try and make my own golf game and wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted to approach it. I decided to make some “quick” prototypes for the hitting mechanics and see which one I liked more. Below is a video of the results so far.
I’ve spent a bit more time on the top down version than the side view one. That’s partly because that’s the mode I was more leaning toward before even making the prototypes, and also because it was the one that took the most custom work to get going.
For the side view mode, I am just using Unity’s 2d physics to add force to a ball and then playing around with ground materials and stuff to alter how the ball bounces and rolls and so on. Getting it to work the way I want was mostly me figuring out what all the physics properties of a rigidbody2d actually mean, and only really learning them at a very basic/beginner’s level. I did get to learn about how to use physics scenes to simulate things to create my trajectory line, which was cool. Tarodev has a great tutorial on how to do that.
For the top down, I ended making everything from scratch, for the most part. This was because Unity’s Physics2d doesn’t really behave in the way I want it to for a top down game. Physics2d will apply gravity to the X or Y coordinates, so it works great for a side view game. For a top down view, where “up” in the world would really be on the Z-axis instead, Physics2d and Rigidbody2d’s don’t really work because they ignore the Z-axis.
Now, I could have just made a 3d scene, oriented the camera for top down, and then changed the Physics3d gravity direction to the Z-axis. I decided against this because I didn’t want to fiddle around with the rendering to make it still look like a pixel art 2d game. Also, I liked the idea of having to calculate everything. It involved a ton of math and having to quickly relearn a bunch of trig that I’ve really already forgotten. Calculating the hit trajectory, bouncing off the ground (and changing it based on the “type” of ground”, figuring out how to fake a ball rolling, vector math I don’t understand, just lots of fun stuff!
Have I decided which of the two modes I will make going forward? No, not really. I kind of want to make both. Maybe have the top down be “Goblin Rules Golf” and is just like playing golf, and the side view as “Goblin Rules Croquet” or something. I want to finish some of the hit mechanics up on the top down and then maybe add some of that to the side view after and then just work from there.
Next Steps…
Polishing up these golf turds I guess.
Smell ya later, nerds!