A Rebuilt Club, and a First Build

Both games moved this week. Here is what is real, with pictures where there is something worth looking at.

The golf club, laid out again

The club grounds were rebuilt as a campus rather than a strip. The practice range sits to the north with a new pavilion, the clubhouse beside it, a fountain court in the middle, the Pro Shop and the members' terrace to the south-west, and a new four-bay cart barn to the south-east. Every path connects to every other, at a constant width, with proper corners.

Most of the work is the kind you only notice when it is wrong. Buildings, trees, people and carts now sort by where they stand on the ground, so nobody walks in front of a wall they should be behind or stands on a roof. Trees, benches and signs have real footprints you walk around rather than through. The bridge over the pond was cut again so it reaches both banks, and you can walk across it.

The water garden at the golf club: a pond with lily pads and ducks, crossed by an arched timber bridge that reaches both banks, with a paved path running past it. — The bridge now reaches both banks. It used to stop short of one, which you only find out by walking into the water.

Built for a controller, and for Steam

The golf game is no longer planned for phones. It is a controller-first game on desktop, heading for Steam first and Nintendo Switch after that. A Windows build is rebuilt and boot-tested every time it changes.

To be precise about where that stands: this is the foundation, not the finish. Steam itself is not integrated yet, so there is no store page, no achievements and nothing to wishlist. Switch is a target the code is shaped for, not something that runs today. Everything in this post is from the Windows build.

One visible side effect is that the screenshots on the project page are now 16:9, the shape of a monitor or a television, instead of a phone.

On the range

The range still reports what a launch monitor would, which is the reason it exists: a new driver should be a decision, not a guess.

The driving range after a shot: a readout panel lists carry 203 yards, total 211, offline, apex, launch angle, spin and face-to-path, with a line of pure contact and yardage flags out on the field. — A pure strike with the starter driver. The numbers are the ones the simulation used, not a summary of them.

What is being built next to it is a way to compare two clubs side by side, so the question you actually have, which of these goes further and which of these misses less, is answered before you have to read anything. It is in progress and not finished, and it will get its own post when it is.

The second RPG, running on its own

Untitled RPG Project II has its first standalone Windows build. It is still a grey room with a placeholder hero in it, and that hero moves on a keyboard or a physical controller, outside the editor, as a real program. It is covered by tests that run inside the engine as well as outside it.

It is still all placeholders, and there is still nothing to hand out. But there is a difference between something that works in the editor and something that works on its own, and this is the first time the second game has been the second kind.

What is not in here

There is more on the workbench than this post covers. Some of it is still being played to find out whether it stays, and it will be written about when it has earned that, not before.

See you in the next world.