I've been working on a game that I'm calling Golf Golf. Here's a demo video:
The game is already incredibly playable for me, I play it all the time in public transportation or to kill time whenever I'm out somewhere. That's been my ultimate goal for the past year or so, make a game that I want to play, and that I can make changes to when I want.
I do, however, want to submit it to the Catalog eventually. One important step, to me, is to make it more evident to new players how to play the game.
Golf is a card game that I play with my parents whenever I visit.
Cards are arranged in a 3 x 2 grid, and players take turns flipping, drawing, or swapping with the discard to lower the values of their cards. Lowest score in a round ("hole") wins. Matching rank (number, face value, etc.) reduces the column's score to 0. Kings are 0, Queens and Jacks are 10, and 2's are negative 2. So, ideal score in a column is -2 (King and 2), but you're usually seeking 0 via a match or close to it with a King and a low card.
Golf Golf is this card game, but each round's score is used to influence a golf swing. It is ridiculous, but it works.
You can see in the video, the three columns are assigned attributes of the swing - first column is power, second is aim (direction - hook/swing), and the third column is loft angle. The score in the column influences the swing.
The problem I've run into while thinking of how to prepare this for public release is that very little of the details of this are evident from the visuals.
The value from the power column doesn't translate directly into power - e.g. a 20 score (highest possible in a column) doesn't mean 20 power. The power column's score is actually the power variance. I gave each club relative stats, one of which is power, and the lower the score, the more likely you are to hit the ball with the club's exact power. A higher score means that you could possibly hit the ball too hard or too soft. The same is true of the aim and loft columns. If you get a high loft score, then the ball might get sent at a lower or higher loft angle than expected from a consistent swing of the current club. A high aim score means that the ball might get sent to the left or to the right of the direction you are aiming.
Generally, if you play the card game how you normally would, and score well, the ball should go pretty close to where you want it to go. I think it's the easiest to understand for anyone familiar with the original card game.
I think I've been satisfied with that for a while, at least until I made chipping and putting work slightly differently. I realized that for chipping and putting, I need to give players more control over the power. In the real sport of golf it's not enough to hit it hard and straight, the strategy around the green is very different for every player. I want to maintain that, and not make too many assumptions about where the player will want the ball to go.
The solution I've come to, for now, is that for chipping and putting, the power column isn't variance. A higher power score means the ball goes further, and a lower power score means the ball is hit lighter. This gives the player control over distance, and also rewards the player for good approaches - the closer you are to the hole, the lighter you have to hit it, so your overall "score" ends up lower.
However, this mechanical change is difficult to convey to the player. Even I forget sometimes, I get caught up in getting lower scores before realizing that I am using a pitching wedge and the ball ends up going nowhere.
On the screen you can sorta see, you can hold B to bring up a club selection box. After the ball lands and stops moving, and when the next swing begins (you start a new round of the card game), the club is auto-selected, so that players can focus on the card game rather than selecting the club. This happens rather silently, so I made the club selection box pop up for about a second to show that the club has changed.
However, this still leaves the problem that the player can only assume that the power column for the chipping clubs and the putter translates in the same way as with the driver.
I've been tossing ideas around in my head for a while but I'm not really happy with anything yet. I think that even as someone who knows exactly how the game works, it would be more enjoyable for me to play if the systems were clear from the interface.
Sorry for the long post, I accidentally made a confusing game that I'm obsessed with.
If anyone has any ideas or questions, please let me know!