Porting To Mobile

After about a year of Ready Set Golf being released on the Snapchat Games platform, Snapchat closed it down - sad to see! Which meant the game was no longer available at all.

When looking at new projects to develop internally, porting Ready Set Golf to mobile was thought as a nice and quick opportunity! We wanted to learn more about making online mobile games, and a game that’s most of the way there already was seen as a good learning opportunity!

While the core gameplay would be kept the same, a lot of changes still needed to be made around the game. The original game was made for Snapchat in mind - meaning you could see your little Bitmoji character above your player. The game was made in Playcanvas, so a port to Unity was required with a whole new backend. The game was also just unlimited Golf - no main menu to return to, nothing to unlock, just golf, and we needed to make the game a bit more “mobile”.

CHANGING the FLOW

The original game had you play unlimited golf - which meant never needing to go back to a main menu, and made the game a bit too casual. With this, players could just jump in and out of games at any time - meaning, so a total score didn’t totally matter. A bit like a Snake.io game, but that wasn’t going to work for us.

We now had to change how it worked - the game now found players prior to starting a game, and would play across 5 rounds. You would earn points with each round, and whoever had the largest point tally would be the winner! It was still a game of speed, so you’d better be quick!

PLAYING WITH FRIENDS

We also had to develop a new system for playing with friends! In Snapchat the only way to start a game was to start it in a group chat, and that’s not the case here.. I designed how this should now work in a room style fashion - that way you could share a code, or just tell the code, with your friends.

A NEW METAGAME

The original game had no customization whatsoever, but it was always on the cards. This new game made it an opportunity to add a ton of it, and do it in a way that was easy to develop.

We added 4 new types of customization

  • Golf Balls - like eyeballs, hamburgers, or baseballs. We even added some really cool ones with animations, like a Hamster.

  • Trails - which would follow the ball with fun particle effects

  • Flags - which if you can in first would switch the flag to yours so you can gloat

  • Hole effects - which would rise up from the hole when you got to the end of a course

To unlock all this new stuff we had to build a system to make it work. Players could now earn Chests by winning games, or buy them with coins. players can earn XP and level up, unlocking simple customization. A store was added where you could buy more chests, get a fee one daily, and buy coins to get more.

FINAL TOUCHES

A lot of additional touches to the game also took place - a tutorial was added to teach people how to play and how to use the game’s power ups. Some of the levels were slightly reworked, or removed entirely based on player feedback. It was a great team to work with for getting the project up and running - and was considered a gold standard on how we were able to pivot to different ideas quickly in an agile way.

OFFICIAL SCREENSHOTS