Dungeon Golfis a family-friendly, fantasy party game that’s playable through single-player and online or local competitive multiplayer.Dungeon Golflets players choose their whacky golfer character inspired by fantasy archetypes, like the Wily Wizard, Musical Frog, or Rogue, in fantasy-themed dungeon-style golf courses with enemies and obstacles to beat to get a “hole-in-none”.
Game Rant recently spoke withDungeon Golf’s Marketing Manager Bianca Fogah and Managing Director Tony Gowland about the party game’s playable fantasy-inspired characters, level design, and its upcoming early access release. Gowland also spoke about what inspiredDungeon’s Golf’s unique characters, its level design, and its mix of co-op and single-player gameplay.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: How did you come up with the idea forDungeon Golfand were there any key inspirations?
Gowland:The whole thing really came about from a holiday with my family because, in a lot of seaside holidays, you end up playing mini-golf. I was there with my six-year-old daughter, my mom who is a pensioner, and my nephews, my nieces who are kind of late teens and in university, and everyone was playing together. It struck me at the time that mini golf is kind of one of these things that everyone pretty much knows how to play. You’ve got this whole thing of like, you’re using the stick, you’re whacking the ball, and you’ve got to get the ball in the hole in the smallest number of shots. No matter your age, people understand it, and it’s even as skillful as some people can be at things. It’s still quite leveled out. That got me thinking at the time that there was something in that.
Obviously, there are a lot ofmini-golf gamesout there, and it’s trying to come up with a new concept that you could mix it with. We just started looking around and looking into sort of fantasy stuff, and we were smitten by the image of one of the first kinds of characters we came up with – this idea of a big hulking barbarian using an axe to swing and knock the ball around.
We ended up working on quite a few different iterations of things. In the original version of it, we tried doing very Roguelike, technical sort of stuff. It ended up being quite slow-paced, and it lost a lot of the fun of golf. One thing in particular that we found was with the combat. If you have combat where you have to hit enemies repeatedly–which is like a fairly standard, broad, fantasy game type thing–you hit your ball into the enemy, and your ball would bounce back. It’s like, ‘oh, actually, I’ve ended up in a worse position than at the start.’
There’s been a lot of work on it over time–like how do we kind of keep the golf-ness and momentum and use the rules that people understand about golf, but bring this other stuff into it, as well. Again, all the player characters had health, so you were worried about your score, but also about not dying or not running out of health. Having two different things made it quite complicated and made it more difficult to follow.
I’ve got young kids, but one of the benefits that we have is the other designer on the team, he’s got three kids of his own as well. We had our kids in to either play it or we’ll show them things. Quite often, like we all sit down afterward and say, ‘how did your kids find that? Oh no, my kids didn’t understand at all, they found that really confusing. And they felt that it was unfair, or something.’ It’s been really useful for ironing out things like that.
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For example, with the health thing, there were two different things to be concerned about that kind of conflicted. We stuck with the idea of we’ll just roll the health into your score. If a monster attacks you, and you take damage, you get one added to your score. And if you hit your ball into an enemy and defeat it, you get one knocked off your score.
It’s streamlining everything around the golf rules. It feels now like something where, as long as people understand mini golf, which we think most people do, then you may understand how to playDungeon Golf. Obviously, we’ve got other bits and pieces going on as well. There’s plenty of other stuff that we have to teach players, but the real fundamentals of it kind of keep that really understandable and sort of universal concept.
Q: Were there any particular fantasy games or themes in the genre that inspired you for the game, or were you fans of any particular genres that found their way into the game?
Gowland:I wouldn’t say there was a particular fantasy. We wanted to keep it very kind of broad, and we wanted each of the playable characters, so you’d instantly recognize them. That’s the barbarian, that’s the wizard, that’s the skeleton, that’s the rogue, and stuff like that. We wanted to keep it almost generic because it’s the golfing element of it is what gives it its twist, but you want to keep really understandable among the trope take on things. Otherwise, you end up with too many bits.
One of the core things about it as well is we wanted it to be funny and stupid. The entire game is kind of framed as if it’s a TV show. There’s like this whole fictional TV network, Dungeon Sports Network, where it’s like, ‘okay, this is your ESPN thing where on each channel they’ve got different dungeon sports going on. They’ve got this really flashy studio, and there are a couple of presenters who are ex-players sitting there and chatting about tonight’s games. As you’re actually playing, they’re commentating on the game as well. They pop up and sometimes say nice things, sometimes not so much if you’ve done really badly. We have to turn that down a little bit because people were finding it a bit dispiriting when the grumpy commenter kept popping up and being really mean. It’s like, ‘I’m losing score, but now the game’s mocking me.’
But yeah, we wanted to get all of that humor into it, and it’s leaning into the archetypes of what fantasy characters are and whata fantasy dungeonis and that sort of thing. It lets us play with that quite a lot both in the actual characters, but also in the kind of dialogue and stuff as well with the general setup of things. You can have quite a lot of fun with it.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about the characters you mentioned, like the Wily Wizard, musical frog, or skeleton?
Gowland:Yeah, we’ve got skeleton as well. We almost want the game to be almost likea fighting gamea little bit. I’m going to really jump about between your questions now, but it’s when you’re on about what’s different aboutDungeon Golfwith other mini-golf games. One of the things is the characters have different accuracy, different power, and different abilities and stuff like that. It has almost got that fighting game element or likeSmash Brothersor something like that where it’s like, ‘oh, I want to play this character because I like the special abilities. Or I like the barbarian - she’s got a massive amount of power but very little accuracy.’ She just absolutely smashes the ball around the place, and you’ve just got to hope a little bit that it ends up where you want it to be.
Whereas the Rogue character, the stealthy thief, has less power but is very technical and really good at nailing the accuracy of things. We went through and laid out that this character is a goodie and that this character is a baddie.
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Our producer is really into wrestling, and he was talking about like the goodies and the baddies almost in the storyline. Thinking of fun little quirks, our wizard is this really rickety old wizard guy, but our take on it is he’s a time wizard, that’s his thing. He’s a teenager. He’s been messing about trying to find the timeline where he wins. But by messing it up he looks really old, but he’s actually quite young. He’s almost got thisDoc. Brown fromBack to the Futureyoung person in an old person’s body kind of energy.
Our skeleton almost has the attitude of a teenager, because the backstory is the Necromancer, who’s another one of our characters, one of his special abilities is he can raise skeletons. The backstory there is the skeleton is one of his skeletons raised in last year’s tournament. Just trying to feed in a lot of opportunities for stupid jokes and as much daft stuff as we can get through the commentary or random bits of text in the game and how we can fit it all together.
Q: How do players’ choice of character and special abilities affect the gameplay? It sounds like quite an important choice.
Gowland:Alongside strength and accuracy which are the core stats, each of the characters has two abilities. You’ve got a normal ability and a super ability. As you’re playing through the dungeons, you pick up mana, and it fills up your mana power. Your normal ability uses up one bit and your super ability uses up the full mana bar. The abilities are really themed around the characters as well.
The skeleton character’s super ability is a teleporter. He can pop his head off and chuck his head somewhere else on the course, and then he reappears underneath it. As a player at the start of your turn before you hit your ball, basically you can choose to if you’ve got enough mana, you can use one of your abilities.
Some of them are teleporters, and some of them are things where it will knock other players' balls around or kind of deal damage to other players and affect their scores, or you might be able to defeat a nearby monster. The barbarian has an ability where she gets really raging and becomes immune to damage that turn. You get an even less accurate shot that turn, but she becomes immune to damage because she’s raging. The frog can fire out their tongue and that is multipurpose. You can hit enemies with it or if you fire the tongue against the wall, it will pull you into the wall, so you can kind of move yourself around. I think the one that proves more controversial in the development team as we’re play testing it is the time wizard.
His special ability swaps the positions of every player. If one player has got quite close to the hole and the wizard fires off his specialty, you may end up swapping places and really screwing over the other players. It’s almost likeMario Kart. We wanted to get quite aMario Kartvibe to it. It’s funny when you look at something likeMario Golf, you’d think thatMario Golfwould be to Tiger Woods, whatMario Kartis to like toGran Turismoor something like that. But it’s not.
When we playedMario Golf, it’s still like a proper golf game. You have to think about clubs, and you have to think about wind. You’re not actually doing platforming stuff that much. All character’s specials are quite similar and stuff. We really wanted to get something where you’re able to be in last place and then fire off a special ability or get a really lucky shot, and you end up winning all of a sudden or really screwing over one of the other players, and that sort of thing.
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We wanted it to be something where people would sit next to each other playing it because it’s got local multiplayer as well as online multiplayer. We really wanted something where people sat next to each other, and you’d kind of curse at your friends – like, ‘I can’t believe you’ve just done that.’ When we’re playtesting it in the studio, it can get quite heated, but it’s good. For us, that’s the sort of thing where you’re able to tell it’s working quite well.
Because as well as being able to use your abilities to mess with the other players, the balls have collision on them, so you’re able to see where the other players’ balls are and try and knock them off course or knock them out way off. If you knock someone and their ball hits a barrel, then that barrel explodes and fires them off somewhere else. You can get really nice chain sequences and random events where it can end up quite chaotic. It’s one of those things for us where it feels a lot like actual mini-golf.
We’ve played a fair amount of mini-golf as a team, now. I think we’ve done about three or four kinds of team outings playing mini-golf, and it always ends up where someone could be doing quite well, and then they just have an absolute nightmare of a string of holes or something. It’s really wanting to get that kind of that chaos and not randomness but almost like rubber banding, like aMario Kartkind of thing – it’s not random, but you’re never definitely completely out of the game. There’s always a bit of a chance of a comeback.
Yeah, like star ability at the end or something.
Gowland: Yeah.
Q:What’s the level design like in each biome, and how do these compare?
Gowland: We’ve got different settings. The first one that players will see is a very “dungeon-ey” dungeon. It’s like thisold dwarven fortress, big stone walls, and that sort of thing. We’ve got one called a volcanic forge, so it’s all lava and machinery. Then the final one that we’ve been working on is the ancient temple, which is kind of outdoors, and it’s meant to be on the top of a mountain dedicated to this Were-Jaguar God.
We didn’t just want the different holes to functionally feel exactly the same. Each one of them has different monsters, and there are different gameplay elements in different ones. For example, in the ancient temple, there are wind vent things that swing around and can blow your ball off course. Whereas in the volcanic forge, there are conveyor belts that are moving poppers full of lava about the place, so you’ve got to avoid them. Like big swinging mallets and smashing machinery things pounding around.
The mountain fortress one, which is the first one, has things like draw bridges, teleporters, and stuff like that. There are all these different kinds of elements, so different holes have different biomes. They’re not just visually different, they actually play differently.
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Q: What kind of other enemies can players expect to find, and how do they affect the gameplay, like the Fire Golems?
Gowland: When enemies attack you, taking damage always feeds into your score and because golf isa turn-based game, the enemies are kind of turn-based as well. If you end your turn with your ball too close to an enemy, it’ll attack you. At any point, players can bring up a little bit of UI that shows you these are the dangerous pits to try and avoid. If you end up too close to an enemy, it’ll attack you, and different enemies have different abilities.
As you get further through the game, we add slightly more complicated enemies that can do more advanced things. One of the things with the golems is they’ll pluck off like a chunk of themselves and throw it at you, but then that explodes and affects the course. One of the things we have with being golf is sand and grass and those sorts of things that’ll slow you down ,but also the oil and slime that’s actually kind of slippery speeds your ball up a little bit.
Whenthe fire golemthrows a chunk of itself at you and that explodes, it’ll leave a splash of oil on the course. That means the next time you’re playing through that or players that are coming behind you have a slightly different set of obstacles to deal with. It’s one of those things where we don’t just want oh these enemies are all basically exactly the same, they just look different. It’s like each one of them has a slightly different behavior for the players.
Q: What kind of opportunities might players have toperform trick shots? Is that a thing in the game?
Gowland: Yeah, I think the main thing with trick shots is the players have after-touch on their ball, so once you take your shot, you have a limited amount of control. You can kind of bend your shot around a little bit or try and avoid some hazards and that kind of thing. That feeds a lot into just trying to avoid little traps, and because enemies will only attack you if you end up in their attack range, you can see your ball rolling toward the danger zone and use the after-touch to try and get away.
Like I said, the actual courses have these kinds of obstacles like exploding barrels and things like that, that will bounce you around, move you, jump pads. We wanted it to get in like a lot of stuff that makes the game very dynamic and kind of moves your ball around a lot. Stuff you don’t typically get on real-world mini-golf courses.
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Q:Could you explain more about shooting a ‘hole in none’ rather than a ‘hole in one’?
Gowland: That essentially came out of the scoring system. If you defeat a monster, you get one knocked off your score. We realized if you’re a bit canny about how you line up your shots and how you use your abilities and stuff like that, it’s perfectly possible for players to defeat a monster on a final shot before they get into the hole, and then they get a hole in none. It wasn’t something that we put in deliberately, it was just something where it’s like, well, we found that you can do it. We had to put in some nice UI or something to really reward players about this because it’s something that, again, feeds into what makesDungeon Golfdifferent from other mini-golf games.
Q: How do the single-player tours to become the GUDGOAT(Greatest Ultimate Dungeon Golfer Of All Time) compare to competing against friends inlocal or online multiplayer?
Gowland: The multiplayer mode is basically you pick a course and each course is currently six holes long. You pick a course, you take what rules you want for who gets to play next and multipliers for difficulty, and that sort of stuff. Then, you play through those, and that’s your multiplayer experience.
The single-player is something that we’re still figuring out a little bit. Because obviously – and this is one of the things with the early access launch that we’re going to do – we’re figuring out a little bit of what players actually want, how players respond to different things, and how people actually play the game a little bit. At the moment, the single-player is like a kind of structured system where you play through this course and if you come in under par, or if you win on a particular course, then it unlocks the next course.
Depending on which single-player thing it is, we can control the rule set around that course, but also we can also set like, ‘okay, the player has to be this character and they’re playing against these other characters.’ Our plan is to use that to set up with the characters like little kind of grudge things, so you might havea single-player storylinewhere it’s like the Necromancer versus the skeleton as a kind of dad versus rebellious teenager showdown. The commentators feed into that, and it all gets framed with the people in the studio chatting about the sort of history of this kind of conflict that they’ve got going on. Like I said, it’s something where we’re kind of playing around a little bit with exactly what people want out of it and what we can achieve with it. Hopefully, during early access later, we’ll find out a little bit more about that. And there are some cool things that we can do with it.
Q: What are your plans for early access and when people will get to see a bit more of the game?
Gowland:Did you want to chat a bit more about that?
Fogah:The plan for early access is currently heading towards q3 of this year. Towards that point, we’re going to be doing playtests, and we’re going to start getting people involved so they can see more. We’ve got our Discord up and running at the moment. I’m going to start posting more things, putting it out into the community between Twitter and TikTok, and things like that to allow people to see more of the game, see more fleshed-out bits of the game, and see sometimes things that go wrong in the game. Because people love it when they see things that tend to go wrong.
We are hoping that early access will give us a good foundation to find out what people actually enjoy about the game and to be able to allow people to be a part of that community. I know that there’s like different aspects around early access that people feel towards it, where they’re not sure. But we want to be as clear and as communicative as possible as a company. To be like, this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re working on, this is what you can expect, this is when you can expect it just so we can make sure that it’s a good turnaround, and that people feel like they’re involved every step of the way. So yeah, we’re hoping that early access will be a really good point for us. I didn’t know if Tony you want to add anything else to that that I’ve missed.
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Gowland:Yeah, I think that’s spot on. I mean we’re a 10-person team. Like I said,Dungeon Golfhad a couple of forms when we were trying to figure it out. Now, we’ve been working on this version of it for like the last year, we are confident that it’s like, well, we enjoy playing this, and we think that there’s still a lot of fun. But there are a lot of things even within the development team, there are things about like, is this control scheme better or is this control scheme? Or should this do this or should this do that? You eventually hit a point where you’re like you may just get this out into public playtest and lead into the early access and use them to help identify bugs a little bit.
Our intention is just to be very responsive and learn a lot from what the player base actually wants, as to how we build out the rest of the game. Like, do we want to put in a level editor? I mean, it would be a big commitment. It’s like, do people actually want that? I don’t know. We’ll find out. Well, basically, if people ask for it in early access, that’s the sort of thing that we can then work on.
Fogah:Yeah, one thing to add to that as well, as we were talking about it internally, it’s kind of a point of accessibility, how different players are findingthe game accessibleto them, or what they’re finding challenging. Because for us, obviously, we all have different things within our team, and we only know from that team. We don’t know what other people might find useful and what they might not, and doing research into the kind of other golf games, I saw quite a few different people who said actually this way of hitting the ball doesn’t work for me because I have an accessibility issue. So how do we work around that? How do we make it so that it’s a game for everybody, not just for us? So that was a big point of it as well of doing it.
Q:On Steam, the game’s description includes aStar Warspun: ‘May the Fores be with you.’ Could you tell us more about that?
Fogah:I think one thing I noticed about each Steam game, or at least quite the prolific ones, is they all end with something that makes you feel like you want to play the game or some form of desire. One of the things I’ve learned about working with our workshop is a lot of the games that are produced at the workshop are games for joy, games for fun, and games for a younger audience. Everybody understands theStar Warsreference, even as a pun of aStar Warsreference, but it’s like giving people that hope that we wish you have a good game, that we hope you’d have a good time, and to remind people that the whole premise of this game is to have fun and to have a good time. And yeah, I just really enjoy punning things in general. Golf puns are great.
Gowland:Yeah, I think it’s one of those things like Bee said, like all of our games, like our workshop, we make things and we want them to be family-friendly to a large degree. I mean, yeah okay, there’s a bit of fantasy violence in there. There’s a little bit of that sort of stuff, and the multiplayer is obviously a bit competitive. But there’s no swearing, there’s no blood, there are no people getting chopped up or anything. It’s a family-friendly thing, and that’s what we do with all our titles. But also, I grew up on stupid80s and 90s cartoonswith really bad puns. That kind of humor just really appeals to me in terms of what we’ll put into the game. We can get that across to people on the store pages - we don’t want people to come into this thinking that this is going to be Tiger Woods, like really serious golf. Like, they would have a bad time if they thought that.
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Q: You mentioned the game is likeMario Kart. Would you say that’s been a big influence in the design or have any other non-golf games or games you might not expect been an influence?
Gowland:Yeah, from a kind of design point of view,Mario Karthas been a big one, wanting that kind of feeling of knockabout stuff. And the accessibility, it’s like one of the awesome things aboutMario Kart 8is you can switch on modes where it’s like a three-year-old can sit with a controller and hold down a button. Tey won’t win, but they’ll feel like they’re playing the game along with the rest of the family. It’s really, really nice to be able to do that, so it is like a lot of that family inclusivity thing that we’ve been aiming for.
It’s funny in terms of it other golf games. I mean, there are quite a lot of mini-golf games on Switch and on Steam, and I think I’ve played them all as research. But nothing actually does hit the same sort of point that we’re aiming for withDungeon Golfin terms of the kind of characters and stuff like that. Having that kind of real personality to it - there are very few games out there that have that personality. I know it’s bold for a 10-person indie company based out of Edinburgh to say, ‘oh yeah, we make games that are a bitlike Nintendo games.’ But you know, that’s kind of what we’re shooting for is that level of personality and that level of kind of world-building, and you understand who all the characters are and then pick out your favorites and that sort of thing.
A: In games likeGolf with Friendsyou don’t really have a face to the character, you don’t know who they are, you’re just shooting the balls really, aren’t you?
Gowland:Yeah and there are other mini golf games where you do have kind of characters, but they’re all felt quite generic characters like that’s the cool guy and that’s the cool girl. It’s like oh come on, you can do better than that. Where’s your violin-playing frog character? You can do more! And that’s not to say that we don’t have a golfer. One of our characters is literally the golfer. Because when you put it next to the line-up of all of these weird fantasy characters, you’ve got this golfer and she’s in her proper golfing clothes, it makes her funny by comparison. Like yeah, we’ll have a golfer in there.
Q: Anything else like that about early access or anything like that or do you feel like you covered everything?
Gowland: Yeah, I think so. Was there anything you wanted to add from a marketing point of view, Bee?
Fogah:Anything else from a marketing point of view that I wanted to add? I think my biggest thing is making sure the community and people feel heard by us because that was a big thing for me. During my research into different games or the games people call vaporware–I can’t think what the term is, games that exist and just disappear suddenly–it was that people just felt like they had been abandoned. I just want to make sure that with the way the game is and it being fun, being family-friendly, families feel included. Kids, adults, anybody of any age, anybody of any intersectionality, anybody feels included. Everybody’s here to play the game and play together. We’re all here to have a good time. That’s it.
[END]
