Goblin Rules: Golf: The Demo (Super Early Access)

Welcome to the page for Goblin Rules: Golf! This is the first "demo" of the golf mode I plan on adding to Goblin Rules Football! Right now, you can play as one goblin on one golf hole. It's a pretty normal game of golf at the moment. More will come later! Hopefully!

lol I added so many screenshots in the how-to-play section but I pasted them in so it looks like itch won't display them on the public page despite still displaying them in my "edit game" page. Oh well fuck me I guess

How-to Play

First, launch the game! Extract the zip, open the GoblinRulesGolf directory (if you extracted it to the directory...), and then double click on Goblin-Rules-Football.exe (game doesn't work if I change the exe's name...).

Goal:

Hit the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. You get a stroke when you hit the ball or when you get a penalty for the ball landing in water or going out of bounds (off screen).

Controls:

Some of the controls will be displayed by the game, such as "press space to start turn." The rest aren't. Here is what they are:

Aiming:

Change the direction of your hit with the left and right arrow keys. "Left" and "Right" are relative to where you are aiming. Imagine you are starring in the direction you are aiming. Pressing the left key will move the ball to your left (counter clockwise) and the right arrow key to your right (clockwise).

Change the distance you will aim to hit with the up/down arrows. Up means aim further away, down aim closer toward you.

Hitting

After you aim, you press SPACE to start your hit.

The first space readjusts the camera to the player. Nothing will happen yet. If you wish to adjust your aim before hitting, press LEFT CONTROL.

Press SPACE a second time and the hit will begin. You will see a little white icon move left on the bar at the bottom. This is where you will submit your hit distance. The further left on the bar, the further the hit will be:

Press SPACE a third time to lock in your hit power. A yellow icon will appear where you pressed space.

When the white icon reaches the far left sound of the bar, it will bounce back and move right. This is when you will submit your hit accuracy. Your goal for the accuracy is to press SPACE a fourth time to lock in your accuracy. You ALWAYS want to submit your accuracy as close to the left most black icon as possible, and at the very least somewhere on the green part of the bar.

If you submit your accuracy outside of the green part of the bar, or don't submit accuracy at all before the white icon hits the far right side, you will SHANK your hit, resulting in a wild, uncontrolled and short hit. Not good!

If you submit your accuracy a to the left of the black icon, your ball will veer to the left by a few degrees. If you submit to the right of the black icon, it will veer to the right. In the above image, my accuracy submission would cause my hit to veer slightly to the right. The further your accuracy submission is from the black icon, the less accurate your hit will be.

Adjusting the Distance

I mentioned before that you can adjust the distance of your shot when aiming. When you change your distance, a third black icon appears on the bar between the two other icons.

If you want to hit the ball to the distance you adjusted to, you want your first submission for your hit distance/power to be on top of that third icon.

Spin

You can adjust top spin, back spin, and left to right spin, by clicking on the ball above the spin text.

I had a very long write up about how to use spin, but itch.io decided that a token was missing and deleted everything, and I will NOT be typing it out again. Thanks itch! Long story short, top spin decreases effect of wind and causes the ball to bounce further. Back spin increases effect of wind and causes bounces to be higher and shorter, and for the wedge can bounce backward. Left and right spin cause the trajectory to curve, and your bounce will go to either left or right relative to where it lands.

Right click on the ball to reset the spin to neutral/no spin.

Changing Clubs

Pressing 1 key at the top of the keyboard will change your club. The club types are:

• Driver
• Iron
• Wedge
• Putter

Some clubs can only be used on certain terrains. The putter can only be used on the fairway and green. Only the wedge can be used in sand traps/bunkers. Each club's max distance is affected by the terrain it is on. Some more so than others. The driver is greatly affected by the rough, the iron less so, and the wedge isn't affected at all.

Zoom Out

You can view a zoomed out view of the hole by pressing the ` key aka the back quote aka the tick aka lowercase tilde.

Score Board

View the scoreboard by holding down tab!

Weather

There are two "weather" aspects to consider for this game. Wind and Rain.

Wind will effect your ball in the air. A southward wind pushes your hit southward, and so on for all the other directions. The aiming trajectory DOES NOT take wind into account! The aiming trajectory only shows where the ball will go if you hit a perfectly accurate hit with no wind.

Rain will effect how far your ball travels in the air, and how fast it rolls on the ground (important for putting!). The heavier the rain (rain can be light, medium, or heavy) the greater the effect. Rain will decrease the distance of your hits, decrease the height and distance of bounces, and slow down how fast the ball rolls on the ground. The aiming trajectory DOES NOT take rain into account! You must adjust your hit distance based on the rain. If the weather is "clear," there will be no rain effect on your hits and putts.

Wind and weather are randomly set in this demo! It changes with each new game, and has a chance to change slightly after each turn.

Slopes

On the ground you will see little arrows point in directions. These are the slopes of the ground.

• Purple slopes are fast or "steep" slopes
• Dark Blue slopes are medium in terms of speed/steepness
• Light Blue slopes are slow and the least steep

Think of slopes as adding a force in the direction they are pointing. If a ball is rolling directly eastward and rolls over a slope tile pointing northward, the ball's rolling direction will start to move northward. The force is applied every physics frame (every 0.02 seconds or 50 times per second). The longer the ball is on a slope tile, the greater the effect of the slope force will be. Purple slopes have stronger forces than dark blue slopes, which are stronger than light blue slopes.

Slopes are very important for putting! Adjust the direction of your putt to take into account any slopes you may roll over. If you want to ball to continue directly eastward, and it will roll over a northward slope, aim your shot slightly down/southward to mitigate the effect of the slope.

But slopes don't just effect putting! When a ball bounces on a slope, the slope direction will effect its bounce direction as well! If a ball is traveling eastward with no spin and bounces on flat terrain (no slope tile) the bounce will be eastward was well. However, if that same shot bounces on a northward facing slope tile, it will bounce in a more northeastward direction depending on the strength of the slope!

Important Note: Where Your Ball Is

While your ball is traveling, you may be wondering where it actually is. As it travels its hit trajectory, the ball sprite gets larger as it gets higher in the area. The place on the ground the ball is above is showing by its shadow.

So, if you hit a tree or something and don't know why because the ball looked to be above the tree or something, it's because the shadow collided with the base of the tree. Collisions for the ball are based on the ball shadow's position!

Multiplayer

Goblin Rules Golf now supports multiplayer! It uses FishNet (poorly, lot's of jitter). To host, click on "start server." To join a game, enter an IP address in the text input field and click on "connect to ip"

To player over the Internet, you will need to use the host's external IP address. The host can find this out by searching "What is my IP Address" in Google or Bing or whatever. The host will need to configure port forwarding for UDP port 7770 (or both). If the host uses any host-based firewalls (like Windows Firewall), they will need to allow access to the port/service/app (or disable the firewall while playing).

You can also play over LAN using your internal IP. You can't connect to an internal IP over the Internet without tools like Hamachi, or if you're in a weird place like a university that uses a non-RFC-1918 address for internal systems and other shenanigans.

Weather Favor

A new concept has been introduced!!! It's called "Weather Favor," and it dictates a lot of what happens in the game. As you may have guessed from the name, it has an effect on the weather in the game, among many other things.

Your current weather favor is displayed next to your name on the scoreboard after the colon (":").

Gaining and Losing Weather Favor

Players can gain and lose weather favor based on their actions, and in particular where their ball lands after a shot. Throughout a hole you will see weather statues. There are good weather statues and bad weather statues.

Good Weather Statue (has wings):

Bad Weather Statue (has lightning bolt):

Around each statue is a ring and shaded area. If you hit your ball and it lands within the ring, you will be given favor based on the statue type. Land in a good weather statue's ring and you gain 1 weather favor. Land in a bad weather statue's ring, and you lose 1 weather favor.

If your ball hits a statue, and hits it hard enough, you will break the statue.

Breaking a statue will have a big effect on favor. Breaking a good weather statue will give you +5 favor and breaking a bad weather statue will give you -5 favor (minus 5). Additionally, when a statue breaks, it takes away the "ring," meaning that no other player can receive or lose favor from that statue for the rest of the hole.

Note that I said that a statue will break if your ball "hits it hard enough." Statues have "health," so to speak. The damage your ball does is based on how fast it is going. A weak hit will only slightly damage it. If a statue was hit and loses more than half its health, but not enough to break, it will appear cracked.

Another player could then hit the statue again and steal the statue from you! Or accidentally hit a cracked bad statue and get the bad statue penalty.

Immediate Weather Effects from Breaking Statues

If you break a good weather statue, the following happens:

• Any tornadoes are dispersed
• If there is a lightning storm, the storm ends

If you break a bad weather statue, the following happens

• A tornado will spawn and target you
  • If a tornado has already been spawned by a different player breaking a bad weather statue, no new tornado will be spawned. Instead, the current tornado will change to target you!

Not-Immediate Weather Effects from Statues

Weather in the game is now based entirely on weather favor. There is a "base" weather and wind value that is set on the average weather favor among all players. If the average is positive, the base weather will be clear with little wind. If it is negative, it can start to rain, and the wind gets stronger. The more in the negative the average favor gets, the harder it rains and the stronger the wind gets.

There are also individualized effects on the weather based on your favor. If you have very positive favor, you can go "up" a tier of weather. So, if the average favor sets it to light rain as the "base" state, but you have, say, +4 favor, the weather will be clear for your turn. Conversely, if the base state is, say, clear, and you have -4 favor, the weather will be raining for your turn. Wind strength is also effected in a similar way.

Other Effects From Favor

Weather favor effects the following aspects of the game

• Your max hitting distance
• your "inaccuracy penalty" when submitting your accuracy for hits
• Likelihood to get struck by lightning

If you have positive favor, you can hit the ball further, are penalized less for inaccurate hit submissions, and are less likely to be struck by lightning.

If you have negative favor, you can't the ball as far, are penalized more for inaccurate hit submissions, and are more likely to be struck by lightning.

Note that your max hit distance is reflected in the trajectory shown to you. If you have positive favor, the trajectory will show your ball being hit further, and if you have negative favor, the trajectory will accurately reflect your diminished hitting power.

Power Ups

There are now power ups throughout each hole. They appear as crates held up by balloons at various heights (high, medium, and low).

To gain a power up, you must either hit the balloon with your ball and pop it, or hit the crate and knock it free from the ball. The box will fall, revealing your power up.

The power ups are:

Accuracy: Take 50% less of an inaccuracy penalty

Power: Hi the ball 50% further

Higher: Hit the ball 50% higher

No bounce: Ball does not bounce (so you stick the landing)

Drill: Go through obstacles.

Rocket: Use w/a/s/d to move your ball in that direction as it is moving, as though a rocket was attached to it? Basically, you're guiding the ball along and nudging it in directions to compensate for an inaccurate or short shot. Only lasts while your ball is in the air. If the ball bounces or hits an object, you lose the rocket ability.

Wind: No wind for your turn. All other players have worse wind for their next turn.

Rain: No rain for your turn. All other players have worse rain for their next turn.

Mulligan: Re-do your shot and get your stroke back.

To use a power up, you press "p" during your turn to gain its effect. Mulligan is an exception to that. When you have a mulligan, you will be asked after each hit (except for hits that go in the hole) if you want to use your mulligan or pass on to the next player as normal.

You can only have one power up at a time. If you pick up a new one before using your current power up, the current power up is replaced by the new one.