Build a golf course. Run the club. Then go out and play the thing you built, and discover that the bunker you put in to punish other people also works on you.
Download: macOS · Windows · Linux
You inherit a field. There is a clubhouse on it, some trees, a pond that nobody asked for, and thirty thousand dollars. Everything else is your problem.
Paint a tee. Paint a green. Click one, click the other, and that is a hole. Golfers appear from the car park with the confidence of people who have never been asked to pay in advance, because they haven't. They play your hole, they think about it, and on the way to the next tee they hand over what they reckon it was worth. A good hole with a view and a bunker in an interesting place pays like a good hole. A flat strip of grass with a flag at the end pays like a flat strip of grass with a flag at the end. There is no price slider in this game. The golfers are the price slider.
This is the whole loop, and it is a mean one. Happy golfers pay, join the club, buy houses on your fairways and bring their friends. Unhappy golfers pay less, and then they trample the rough and kick sand about and the weeds notice, and weeds make golfers unhappy, and now you are hiring a second greenkeeper at eleven at night because a man called Terry is posting about your dandelions.
A storm rolls in and the fairways go soft and nothing bounces. Night falls and the golfers play on anyway, badly, grumbling, unless you have bought floodlights, in which case they tell everyone it was magic. September comes and the trees go gold. In the volcano scenario, the hazards are lava, the insurance is void, and the mountain reserves the right to redesign hole six.
Two strangers get put in the same group and keep booking the same tee time. Put a bench by the water and see what happens. A former tour pro turns up hitting it sideways and swearing at ducks; if he finds his swing he offers to teach your members for next to nothing. A critic from a golf magazine plays twice, and the second round decides your rating. A fourteen-year-old birdies your hardest hole and needs a tournament to enter. None of these people care about your spreadsheet. All of them affect it.
Host a tournament and a gallery turns out, a few dozen at the club championship and a few hundred for the big one, ringing the greens behind the rope, following the leaders, applauding the birdies and groaning as one when a ball finds the pond. They go home when it is over. You stay.
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When the office gets quiet, take your clubs out. The swing is the old three-click: press to start the marker up the bar, press to set the power where you stop it, and press once more as it comes back down to the line. Anywhere in the green band flies straight. The thin bright line in the middle is a flush strike, and you will know it when you hear it. Early hooks. Late slices. Let it run past the line and you will find out what a snap hook looks like from behind. There are no do-overs, because there are no do-overs.
The ball knows where it is lying. From the rough it comes out hot with no spin and runs forever. From a plugged lie in the sand it comes out angry. Uphill it balloons, downhill it runs, ball above your feet it draws, and the panel tells you all this before you swing so that afterwards you have nobody to blame. The wind is stronger up high than down low, slack among the trees, and it gusts. A high shot into a crosswind is a lesson. A punch is the answer.
The camera follows your ball like television: along behind it as it climbs, then a cut to the reverse angle on the green so you can watch it stop four feet short and spin back to six. On a controller, the right stick swings: pull back, push forward, push straight.
This game was designed, built, profiled and tuned on a Mac. All of it. The trees, the ball physics, the wind, the crowds, the 120 frames a second.
The Windows and Linux builds are real and they work, and they exist because the engine had a checkbox and we are not monsters. But if anyone ever tells you Macs are not for gaming, you may point at this repository and make a small noise.
Start Free Play and a coach walks you through it: paint a tee and a green, join them, lay out the hole, watch the first golfer pay for it, put up a drink stand, hire a greenkeeper, buy a parcel, and then go and play the hole yourself. It gets out of your way as soon as you have done each thing, and Menu, Tutorial brings it back.
macOS. Open the disk image, drag the game into Applications, done. The build is signed and notarized, so it opens like anything else. Apple Silicon and Intel in one app.
Windows. Unzip, run the exe. It is one file with the whole game inside it, no installer, no folder of three hundred DLLs. The first launch may get a SmartScreen warning, because the exe is not code-signed yet: More info, Run anyway.
Linux. Make the AppImage executable and run it. It wants a Vulkan driver, which any current Mesa, AMD or NVIDIA setup already has.
Saves and settings live in the usual place for your platform and survive updates.
Everything works with a one-button mouse such as a Magic Mouse, a trackpad, a wheel mouse or the keyboard. Every camera move is also a button in the Camera bar at the bottom right of the screen.
Camera
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Move the map | Drag the ground, or W A S D, or the arrow keys |
| Zoom | Scroll or swipe, pinch, or + and - |
| Turn | Swipe sideways, Option-drag, Q and E, or right-drag |
| Tilt | Option-drag up and down, T and G, or right-drag |
| Move the map while a build tool is out | Hold Command and drag |
| Back to the usual angle | Home |
| Follow a golfer | Click them, then F |
On Windows and Linux, Option is Alt. If you would rather a swipe moved the map than zoomed, change A swipe or two-finger scroll in the Menu; Shift and swipe then zooms. The Menu also has a Controls card with all of this.
Game
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Pause | Space |
| Speed 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x | 1, 2, 3, 4 |
| Build panel | B |
| Holes and green fees | H |
| Play a round | P |
| Close panel, cancel tool, menu | Esc |
| Full screen | F11, or Control-Command-F |
Playing a round
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Aim | A and D (hold Shift for fine aim) |
| Change club | W and S |
| Change ball | Tab |
| Shape the shot | Q and E |
| Swing | Space or click, three times: start the marker, set the power, stop it on the line. Early hooks, late slices. |
| Quit the round | Esc |
The panel at the bottom tells you how the ball is lying, what that will do to the shot, and how the wind bears on the line you are aiming. After the shot it says how far the wind moved the ball. White stakes mark out of bounds; the aiming ring turns red if the shot would finish beyond them.
With a controller
Any Xbox, PlayStation or Switch pad works, and can be plugged in at any time. The left stick moves a pointer and A clicks, so everything a mouse can do, a pad can do.
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Click; hold to paint, sculpt or drag the map | A |
| Back: put a tool away, close a panel | B |
| Turn and tilt the camera | Right stick |
| Zoom | Triggers |
| Move the map | Push the pointer against a screen edge |
| Step through the panels | Bumpers |
| Game speed; scroll a list; step through a menu | D-pad |
| Menu | Start |
| Pause | Select |
| In a round | Left stick aims, A swings (three presses), or pull the right stick back and push it forward; bumpers change club, X shot shape, Y ball, B stops the meter |
You need Godot 4.7. godot --path . runs the game from this folder.
./lint.sh # every script parses, in seconds
./check.sh full # the headless test suite, a few hundred checks
./perf.sh tour # frame times in the real window
./build.sh # export, once Godot's export templates are installed
./linux.sh # run it on a Linux box over ssh and bring screenshots backEvery push runs lint and the tests on GitHub. A tag like v1.0.0 builds the
release: the notarized macOS disk image, the Windows exe and the Linux
AppImage, attached to the GitHub release by .github/workflows/release.yml.
docs/DESIGN.md is the long version of everything above, with what is and
is not built.
Ground, bark, stone and building textures are from
Poly Haven (CC0). The foliage is painted by
tools/make_foliage.py. Sound effects, ambience and voices are made by
tools/make_sounds.py, which needs brew install vorbis-tools.
Music, all CC0, from OpenGameArt: "Bluebonnet", "Forget Me Not", "Catmint" and "Daisy" by Kistol; "Sunset Plains" by Yoiyami; "Morning Sky" by Centurion_of_war; "Another August" by cynicmusic.