Project description
In Golflantis, you play as a golf ball who’s on his very own epic quest to Atlantis! Guided by commander Golfie, you’ll shoot through the narrow corridoors of the three different environments present in the game. To pass each room, you’ll have to make sure to hit each flagfish to make them happy, all the while avoiding damaging obstacles and picking up oxygen bubbles along the way.
Made over the course of my internship at GodSpear Games, in collaboration with my fellow intern, Joran De Pessemier. Together we designed, prototyped, developed and published this game, with the help of Oscar Tulkens, CEO of GodSpear Games. An incredible amount of focus was put on the polishing of the game, and I hope that’s instantly clear!
The gameplay is quite simple, as it’s all controlled by mouse. Click and drag to shoot your golf ball, and ensure to keep up your combo by picking up things within the timer. However, the ball has an oxygen bar, which you’ll need to refill with oxygen pickups. On your journey, you’ll find chests which you can open with keys to unlock new looks for your golf ball!
My contribution
Golflantis was developed by two interns in function of Godspear Games. Published under it’s name on CrazyGames, the game performed less stellar than anticipated. Yet still we were all able to learn under it’s failures. For me, it was the first fully published game that was released publically, and so I’m still quite proud of it. In fact, while it most certainly has it’s faults, I still believe it to be a game of pretty great quality. I was fortunate to be able to work on this project alongside Joran, and it was a great project to learn from. Here are the main takeaways:
- Scope is greater than mechanics: Although the gameplay of Golflantis is, in itself, very simple. It still cost quite a lot of time to develop. Originally we would develop two smaller games during our internship, however after believing in Golflantis, we decided to expand it. However, the closer we got to a working product, the more we saw more things were required to finish. Changes to generation, how many levels there were, and even alterations to the main mechanics, such as the combo system all delayed the release. This really made me understand quite how important it is to limit your game scope, even beyond game mechanics. Also in pipeline and asset creation. To make sure that at a certain point, you decide, the game is finished, and we’ll round it off for release.
- Target audience and theme: Unfortunately, Golflantis didn’t quite perform as we expected. We found this astonishing, as we had performed multiple playtesting events where people were impressed, and gave generally positive feedback. Yet released on it’s platform, this was not reciprocated. This was a true lesson in thematics and target audience, as in hindsight the lack of focus for a specific theme, combined with the general audience to be found on CrazyGames, means that this game was doomed to it’s performance.
- Polish, polish, polish: Our main focus for this project, choosing a simple mechanic and polishing the f out of it. Every aspect of the game that the player interacts with has some element of polish. Through this, I learned all the different ways you can achieve polish. Mostly, you go for too much, and then dial it back until it feels just right.
Starting out with a brainstorm, we each wrote down multiple concepts each, then pitched them to each other. This project started as a sort of diving game, where you would go down to get loot, then return back to the surface. However after some prototyping, we felt that a more freeform movement felt better. This way, the game was translated to still being about going downwards, however with a free-form movement within the rooms. After we felt like we nailed the general concept, we moved onto the additional mechanics. Each biome would have its own set of obstacles and mechanics that would stack on top of the previous ones.
Eventually, as we were nearing towards the end of the coding recquirements, I moved onto the art side of development. I’m happy to say that I’m quite proud of the way the visuals for the game turned out. From the mechanics, to the level itself and the decoration on top of it, I drew all of it within photoshop under the guidance of Oscar. This way, the style was quite close to the other games within the GodSpear Games portfolio. I learned a lot about shape language and silhouettes during this, as not every concept was easily translateable into the rounded and cartoony style.