#1560: Walkabout Mini Golf’s Incredible Fusion of Worldbuilding, Gameplay, Social Dynamics, & DLC Experimentation

Walkabout Mini Golf is really an incredible accomplishment of VR design with its fusion of worldbuilding, compelling physics-based gameplay, the unique social dynamics and community it’s able to cultivate, and over 4 1/2 years of consistent DLC courses every 8 weeks or so. They have launched 33 total courses, and just recently announced that they’re bumping the price by $10 and adding 6 DLC courses into the base game so that is now 14 courses for $24.99. It’s still an incredible deal, especially considering that there are still 19 DLC courses available, which has helped earn the #20 spot on Meta’s best-selling Quest apps of all time.

During my trip to SXSW, I had a chance to speak with the original solo developer of Walkabout Mini Golf, Lucas Martell, who has since grown the Mighty Coconut Studio team to 35 people. We talk about how their design process for courses starts with worldbuilding, but also how his script-writing background has helped to inform how they tell the story of each of these worlds through the evolution of game mechanics and shape language that each course is exploring. After I had a chance to interview Martell, I was given access to all 33 of the courses, which I have played through over the past week in order to provide a bit more context on what they’ve been able to accomplish with Walkabout Mini Golf. It’s certainly an achievement within VR design that combines the best part of immersive worldbuilding, convincing gameplay, and compelling social dynamics that keeps players coming back again and again.

Be sure to check out the table below which lists the timeline of the release of the 33 different courses that are now available.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. So in today's episode, I'm going to be doing a bit of a deep dive into Walkabout Mini Golf, which is an absolutely incredible experience that I'm admittedly a bit of a latecomer to. I didn't get a chance to play through a lot of the game until just ahead of South by Southwest 2025, where I I had scheduled to do an interview with the original solo developer and creator of Walkabout Mini Golf, Lucas Martel. So what Lucas and the larger Mighty Coconut Studio team has been able to pull off is nothing short of astonishing VR design and just incredible world building and really fun mechanics and create a really amazing social game. And they also have a very unique business model relative to other folks within the VR industry. And so they originally launched Walkabout Mini Golf on September 24th, 2020, which is 19 days ahead of when the Quest 2 launched on October 13th, 2020. And so the original Walkabout Mini Golf launched with four courses, and then over the course of the next year, they launched four more additional courses they just added to the base game. And then starting in November 18th, 2021, they started to do these DLC packs where you could buy a new golf course for like 399. And so since they've originally launched, they've launched 25 DLC packs, which is on average like once every 58 days or so. So every couple of months, usually around six weeks at a minimum, but sometimes a little bit longer, sometimes they skip a month, but it's a pretty consistent cadence that they've been putting out really quality content over the last four and a half years. So after this interview, I actually got access to all of the DLC packs and was able to play through all of them. So at the end, I'll have a little bit more of my thoughts on the different courses and the different themes, the different genres, which ones that I really liked. And also on May 1st, they not only launched a new DLC, but they also changed the base of the game. So if you already own Walkabout Mini Golf, then you should go back and check out the six new courses that they just added to the base game. So Shingara Laa, Sweetopia, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Upside Town, Laser Lair, and Alfheim. Those are all added to the base game now. And so the base game now comes with 14 courses rather than just eight. And they also bumped up the price from $14.99 into $24.99, which I think is still one of the best deals in the VR industry, especially as you start to play with your friends and family, because it's just a really fun and engaging experience. And there's lots of other modes. So with each of these courses, there's also a hard mode. So you can basically double those numbers. And there's also these different modifiers that they've been adding to different games where you can play like as a super small mode or low gravity mode. There's also like fox hunts and finding balls. So there's lots of other ways for you to engage with this from not only playing mini golf, but all these other puzzle mechanics, searching mechanics, and also just the whole social dimension of the game as well. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Lucas happened on Wednesday, March 12th, 2025, and it was during the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:03:28.199] Lucas Martell: I'm Lucas Martel. I am the creator of Walkabout Mini Golf and, uh, yeah, run the Mighty Coconut studio based loosely here in Austin, Texas, but we're remote spread out kind of all over the place.

[00:03:40.219] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.

[00:03:44.684] Lucas Martell: Yeah. So I kind of come from all over the place. I was a music major in school and then I moved to Austin, this would have been 2003, getting into the film industry. And so I started off thinking I was going to be doing sound for film because I had a recording studio background. and ended up falling into more of the post-production side on the visual effects side of things. And I started to get really interested in animation. And so I kind of created a project for myself just to teach myself animation. It was a six minute short called Pigeon Impossible. It took five years to make because I was learning the process and did a bunch of behind the scenes videos and stuff as I was doing it. That would have been finished in 2009. and then ended up selling Pigeon Impossible to Fox Animation. And it actually became the basis for Spies in Disguise. It was the last blue sky animation film with Will Smith and Tom Holland. Will Smith turns into a pigeon is the super quick version of that. But yeah, so I had actually been in and around more of the Hollywood side of things, doing anything and everything animation. Mighty Coconut was actually an animation studio. I did a good bit of writing and directing for animation for years, tons and tons of time. Yeah, sort of pitching projects, you know, writing projects. The general rule is if you get ten things sort of optioned, you'll get one thing made. So that was the one thing that I kind of got made. And then during the pandemic, Obviously, a lot of things sort of shut down and I was kind of looking for something to keep my hands busy. And I had had this mini golf game that I had been playing with for a little while and happened to run into a couple of the folks from Oculus at the time at, I believe it was Indiecade, because we had also started to dabble in games and showed them this game like, yeah, finish it up and yeah, we'll put it on the store. So during the pandemic, I basically just said, okay, well, I need to do something. So I started making this walkabout mini golf game. And I think I'd spent probably about a year doing that. And yeah, it was basically a solo project for about a year. And then it turned out that. releasing a social game that was very accessible on the quest platform which was really difficult to develop for at the time it also launched two weeks before the quest 2 came out so pandemic you know one of the few sort of like social games multiplayer games on the quest it was just sort of like a whole lot of luck in the timing of when that came out and now we're we are a team of 35 people that are working on walkabout full-time we've been going for five years and we We release a course every seven to eight weeks and we are now starting to drop more and more stuff almost weekly. So yeah.

[00:06:24.400] Kent Bye: Wow. Yeah. So it sounds like that you did make this transition from working in the film industry and that you started into games. Maybe you could just give a bit more context as how the gaming started to feed into this new exploration of more interactive forms and immersive forms of entertainment.

[00:06:41.638] Lucas Martell: Yeah, I think for me, I was, I mean, I've always been interested in games when I was a teenager. I think I played around with level editors for a couple of the different like first person shooters and stuff. And just the level editing was always something that really interested me. I think the reason that I got into games more recently, you know, as a six, seven years ago was also just that the animation process, I always liked actually getting my hands dirty and doing stuff like actually writing code and doing some of the art and everything. And I think in the animation world, I had become so focused on the really, really big picture stuff, the writing and directing, which is super fun, but it's also a whole lot of managing people. And it's not so much the actual hands-on stuff that I love that to me, games was almost more of a creative outlet. And it was also something that just, you know, especially working in the Hollywood industry, animation especially, it is so difficult to get a project made for, you know, you're going to big studios and asking for $100 million. It's gotten a little bit less expensive than that. But a lot of the types of films that I were doing were just so big that it was so much politics. And to me, games was kind of back to my roots a little bit of that more pure experience. And so, yeah, I've always just leaned towards more of the indie side of things. And I guess that's maybe ironic hearing me say that after I talk about the Hollywood side of things. But yeah, to me, the thing that I love about games and about VR in particular is that it is an environment that is much more accessible to indies. The marketplace has kind of changed a little bit the last couple of years, but it's very experimental and it's it's one of those spots that seems to reward people who come at things a little bit differently and maybe don't necessarily take a big triple a approach to stuff so i think vr was always just something that i was interested in i think i remember getting my first i think it was a dk2 back in when whenever whatever year that would have been probably 2017 or something like that 2014. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess I remember there were actually a couple of other projects that I did and played around with and a couple of other concepts that I did prototypes for. And it just happened to be that Walkabout was the first one that we actually finished. Yeah. I've got a couple other things that are sitting on the shelf that are like one of them is even like half done. And now it's just a matter of finding time to actually get in and do it. So I've actually been playing in the space for quite a while. This was just the first VR game that we actually released.

[00:09:05.399] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, I think there's been a lot of buzz and expansion, and you've got really quite interesting models. I want to dive into all the things, but maybe we'll start from the beginning in terms of from how I start to see all the different things that are happening with Walkabout Minigolf because there's actually the game mechanics of playing Minigolf, which is really satisfying. There's the world-building aspect, so the different worlds that you have. They have the social component that you have, and then you have the other monetization schemes that are kind of interesting in terms of expanding out to DLC packs. And so when I look at it now, it's like really expansive, but maybe you just give me a sense in terms of like where you think the spirit of this game is in terms of like the world building and the design and the actual interaction design. But also it's an experience where people are taking business meetings and kind of hanging out and you know a number of people that have heard in xr industry who have you know like take a archetypal business meeting on the golf course it's now take a business meeting on the walkabout mini golf course but yeah i'd love to just hear from your own perspective in terms of like your iteration and like the core mechanic but also the social and the world building they're all kind of playing together so just describe to me a little bit about your process of how you started to put it all together

[00:10:15.492] Lucas Martell: Yeah. So, I mean, we do tend to think about all of those things fairly holistically, but I think my background on the animation side of things and especially like animation world building is a huge part of animation. So I think that that's always been my comfort zone and probably my favorite part of the process. Although if I get into it for too long, you know, you get burnt out on anything if you spend too many hours on any one particular thing. But yeah, so where it started, so it launched, Walkabout launched with only four courses. And there was, I mean, most of the features that people know about now were not in there. It was very, very bare bones. But that was also because it was mostly a solo project. And then I think the couple of things that really sort of like defined that though was that it was designed to be as absolutely simple as possible. I had done a couple of mobile games as well and so one of the rules that I've developed throughout the years was like you should be able to play the entire game with a single button. And so you can actually play all of Walkabout with just the trigger button. The trigger will automatically warp you to your ball. It can interact with all the menus so like it is literally just a single button. And I think that simplicity is a big thing that carries through to all of our design stuff. But I think the nice thing that that opens up is that once you have an interaction mechanism that is so simple, it means that then you're in there, you're playing golf. So, so much of the interaction then becomes, okay, well now you can actually swing the controller. And there's a huge amount that we've done on the physics side of things to really dial that in. And I will say that I think that some of our success around that is just that it's a very there's so much emergent gameplay that happens just because of the physics engine and the fact that you could play a whole a million different ways you can go in and you can really master stuff or you can just go in and play and kind of screw around and hang out with your buddies and like that's a totally like there is no right way to play it I will say that We have kind of actively avoided a few of the things that a lot of people have been asking for, like leaderboards and some of those more highly competitive elements. I will say that we actually are starting to look at some of those things, but with the idea that we might intentionally make some of that functionality available, but it's not going to hit you in the face. So if you want if you're the type of person who wants leaderboards, you'll be able to get them. but we don't want to change that fundamental behavior or people coming into the game thinking that, oh, that this is a competitive game or that I need to shoot below par on every single course in order to be a valuable part of this community. So all of that kind of like goes back into this overall design philosophy. But I think just going back to the world building, because I do think that's a big element of where we sort of lead from is that the other big sort of core design component from the very initial version of the game was that this needs to be a game where you step in and it's a mini golf course so you need to be able to see all 18 holes or you need to be able to travel around the world and you can see that some of those world building elements were there in those early things, but I feel like now that we've got the full team and we've got a lot of folks on the team who are just far more experienced with world building. And we've got a couple of folks like Don Carson, who was a Disney Imagineer. He's our senior art director. He has brought sort of a theme park aspect and sort of like this real sort of placemaking aspect to our world building that I think is just elevated it infinitely more than I was able to do as a solo dev or even the things that we were able to do just as a very, very small team of four to eight people in sort of those early days. But yeah, the world building aspect, I think, is the thing that keeps people coming back for the most. We want to make the gameplay, we want to make the social, but yeah, being able to tap into the dlc model as almost more like we actually have the whole thing set up kind of like a tv show where it's almost like episodic at any given time we've got eight courses in production you got a couple that are in the writer's room a couple that are in pre-pro a couple that are actually out you know on location then you've got a couple in post but yeah that constant sort of like flow of new stuff it also just keeps it fresh for the team and hopefully the folks that are playing and enjoying the game there's enough variety in those two that it really lets us go to a whole like drastically different from one course to the next course just like the type of worlds that we can do and explore so

[00:14:37.958] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I'm a relative latecomer to Walkabout Mini Golf. I played it for the first time right before coming to South by Southwest. It was in the middle of night. Had a flight in the morning. And I started playing around 2.30 AM, and it stopped around 4 AM. So I played for like an hour and a half. I think I'm realizing that I have subtle levels of social anxiety. So I haven't actually tended to be drawn to a lot of these social games. I do VR chat, but mostly event-based stuff. And a lot of my coverage of the voices of VR has been focusing on events. immersive stories and these one-on-one conversations that I've had about these different projects. And so I've always heard a lot about it, and I've always been super impressed with the different collaborations that you've been doing. And so I was really glad to have this conversation with you as an impetus to actually go and check it out for the first time. And so, I mean, it's so vast in terms of how much stuff is there, but one of the things that I noticed for the first time playing it is that the interaction design in the physics, like you said, is so dialed in that it felt like this feels like I'm on a mini golf course. And so there's two things that come to mind, and then we'll dive into each of them. One is that so there's the ways in which each of these holes are playing into the world. And so there's the larger context of the world, but there's also the specific interaction design of each specific hole and how that individual part fits into the larger hole in terms of a journey that you're taking people on. So there's both the kind of world and the context, but there's also the interaction journey that happens throughout the course of that world that gives you another sense. It's like a story that is more interaction driven. But there's also the observation of that world, which I found that if I was more focused on just playing the holes, I would just teleport and I get transported in the next hole. And I don't observe and appreciate the world as much if I'm just focusing on the interactions. I personally prefer stick locomotion where I can move around. Is that available as an option or is it only to...

[00:16:26.219] Lucas Martell: Yeah. Have you actually found how to fly yet?

[00:16:28.480] Kent Bye: I have not. Well, I think I accidentally clicked on it, and I turned it to giant mode. I don't know if that's what you mean.

[00:16:33.843] Lucas Martell: Oh, that's actually, yeah. So yeah, giant mode is actually where the scorecard is if you just hit the A button on a Quest headset. So if you point your stick straight in the air and you push the thumb stick forward like you would to teleport, it'll actually lift you off the ground, like Mary Poppins is what a lot of people call it. And you can actually fly throughout the entire course. So that's another way of getting around that a lot of people actually prefer as well. So yeah, that was something that wasn't in the original version of the game. the smooth locomotion is absolutely an option in the menu. But yeah, it's what you were kind of talking about before there was the variation between sort of like whether it's more of the world that you're more about sort of like exploring and experiencing or whether it's more of the gameplay. And we kind of intentionally make it so that you can do either and i would say that one of the things that we think about a lot when we are designing a course is that we tend to start with the world first but one of the other things that we established really early on is what this course is going to play like and sometimes that's very simple if there's a new mechanic like upside town uses a gravity changing mechanic where you're actually playing on the walls and on the ceiling and it's definitely the trippiest one that we have done in terms of like a gameplay mechanic but When you have a gameplay mechanic like that, it's all about sort of like kind of more traditional game design where you have a mechanic and you start very simple and you teach the player what this does. And then you gradually start to do more interesting things. Portal is like the classic example of like they take this very simple idea, but then what interesting sort of like side effects can you start to leverage by doing this? So Upside Town has a couple of holes where... you actually have to hit it away from you and then you'll change gravity and cause it to come straight back at your head and hit the green that's behind you. And so some real fun trippy mechanics like that. But even on courses that we don't have that, like a very clear mechanic, We try to establish very early on like a shape language. And sometimes that's like, oh, like a cherry blossom is very square. It's 90 or 45 degree angles. The barriers are wood. They're very, very clean. I'll use a couple other examples from the base game. Seagull stacks is much more curvy. The walls are all this sort of like cobblestone. So you can if you try to play off the walls, it is a really risky thing because it could have you bouncing all over the place. That course also introduces a couple more like gentle, curvy, organic slopes that make it play fundamentally different. But each of those courses does have a overall. shape language that does fundamentally change how it plays. And I feel like I actually feel like we've got a lot of fun room to explore with that because we've learned how much just changing the shape of the holes and just the type of holes that, of course, lean towards. Another example is like Mount Olympus, the course that just released. The big thing that defines that course is the scale. Because it's Mount Olympus, it needs to be giant. And so all the holes are probably three to four times the size that they would be on any other course, which encourages lots more really, really long putts. You kind of have to really whack it on a lot of different holes. it fundamentally changes so that each course does play in a different way and even if it's just the shape we do like to explore that as you go throughout the course hopefully you do still feel the evolution of an idea it's just sometimes it's a shape as a mechanic

[00:19:45.003] Kent Bye: OK. And so it sounds like the world building is kind of the route where you're starting with that center of gravity, that everything's rotating around that, and that you are also having these gameplay mechanics or maybe novel in the shape language that's developing. Can you talk around the curation of the 18-hole course How you're starting to find the rhythm and the story of a course that has 18 holes, but it's designing individual things, but they're fitting within the larger context that's creating this larger journey. And so love to hear around that interaction between that world building process and creating that journey of the interactions.

[00:20:18.180] Lucas Martell: Yeah, so I think that this is actually a place where I think that some of my like TV background actually helps because TV has a very rigid structure. You've got a cold open, you've got an act one, you've got an act two with a couple of breaks in between. Maybe you've got a closer or maybe you got a little tag on the end, but it's sort of like it's this very structured and mini golf being 18 holes kind of provides that structure. So I do think that we have. I hesitate to say a formula, but there is a little bit that the first hole needs to be an intro. It needs to be something that's very, very sort of just like gets you into the right space. It's sort of like the purest, simplest sort of like implementation of an idea. We usually tend to hit the more extremely difficult stuff right around hole 17. And then hole 18 is always meant to be a big closer, but you can almost think of that more like a tag. So that's supposed to be the funny little thing at the very end of a sitcom. But hole 18 being that sometimes it's playing more into the story. Sometimes it's playing more into a gameplay mechanic. So on Mount Olympus, light spoiler alert, if you could call it that, hole 18 is actually the throne room temple of all of the 12 Olympians. And so the hole is actually like a map of Greece and you've got to like hit over the water and try to avoid the Mediterranean. So that is more of a thematic hole. But there's some that are more mechanic based. So, yeah, we do actually kind of have a bit of a formula and we do think about pars and all that sort of stuff. I think probably the thing that we think more than anything else, though, is that we've also kind of developed a bit of an internal language around different whole types. So there would be something like the gimmick hole, which would be the classic example of that would be like the windmill, where you've got to hit it through the gap and avoid the windmill blades. We've got a couple others that we would call like an adventure hole, which is usually more about navigating space. Usually those have multiple ways of play it, multiple pathways through. We usually try to balance those that there's sort of a risky path that if you hit it, it's a really, you know, you've got a shot at an eagle or a birdie, but there's always a safe way that you could play it as well that is relatively easy to get par or something like that on. there's also some mechanics that we consider to be generic in a way but like drop holes so holes where you've actually got to go down or even up a level or something like that we've got probably about a dozen more of those but so we do have kind of a library of those and we don't use every single one in every single course but we do kind of add to those over time and we have kind of found a good balance of those that allow you to have a lot of variety while still playing with the mechanic. And usually the best mechanics, like when we do a mechanics course, usually play off of some aspect of like, oh yeah, if you've got gravity, what interesting thing could you do with those drop holes to put the drop that you're going up above you? Or yeah, different things like that. So yeah, there's a whole, every course is unique, but there is a bit of a formula. And I personally think that having this structure of 18 holes has actually allowed us to do a lot of stuff that other games would have a difficult time because it forces us into a box. You've got this amount of time or space, basically, that you have to say everything you want to say about this world.

[00:23:24.537] Kent Bye: Yeah, I found that it was really quite satisfying to play through some of the initial, I think I picked a random course. Then I ended up on one of the space courses where at some point the difficulty curve felt like a step function where I was like making the different holes and then I had to like hit it and it was bouncing through the air off these things. And if you missed it, then you basically have to start over and do it again. And then I very quickly hit the limit of how many ever strokes it took for that hole. And they're just like, okay, well, we're not going to have you like keep going forever. So we're just going to skip you to the next hole. So, yeah.

[00:23:56.998] Lucas Martell: Well, we call those do or die holes and we try to avoid like, you can have one, maybe two on a course, but I think that, yeah, tethys station is the one that you found. And we actually, I think that course has a few of those on there and we've actually tried to pull back on those because those are the ones that there is no option. There is no multiple ways to play the hole. It's either you execute the thing that we want you to do. or you don't, and then you have to keep doing it. And we found that some of those, like they can be super fun because it is more like a puzzle a little bit, or it's just, yeah, it's super fun to watch the ball do it, but it can also be frustrating if you're not able to do it. So yeah, that's another hole type.

[00:24:33.004] Kent Bye: Yeah. So it felt like a little demoralizing just to have like a decent score, just totally get blown out. But it feels like there are certain holes where it's easy to enter, but then it takes a lot to master it. So there's a lot of room there to learn how the physics are maybe different. And in terms of the gravity in the physics, is that gravity always the same, even in space? Or are you also playing with different gravity levels in this?

[00:24:58.191] Lucas Martell: Yeah, so we do actually have an option. So the Mars Gardens course that came out in, I think, September of last year, of 2024, we originally designed that course for low gravity. And then through the testing process, it seemed like it kind of messed some players up because then they would have to recalibrate for lower gravity. And so ultimately, we ended up releasing that course, the default being regular gravity. But there's an option on that course and Tethys Station. and Atlantis, which is underwater, that can all set it to a lower gravity, which completely changes how the course plays. And I believe now that we've actually added that to a few other courses, just because it also sort of fits in with one of the other game modes that we launched not too long ago as mini mode, where it actually shrinks you down to about And maybe about a foot tall, 30 centimeters or so. And so all of the holes, you have a giant ball that's about the size of a basketball now that you're hitting with a giant putter. So it's much more silly. But that actually, because you're smaller, we also have to adjust gravity so that it feels right. Because if you were using regular gravity, it would actually feel like it's... Like, yeah, just like insanely heavy gravity. So yeah, so that mode is actually rolled out with both mini mode and just low gravity comes along with that on several other courses. And we're gradually going back and remastering courses to add it to more of them. But the physics does stay the same. And one of the other rules that we have in the development side of things is that we try at all costs to avoid cheating the physics. There are a couple of things that we can do and our general rule is that it's okay to cheat the physics if it helps the player. And so there are a couple of cases like Upside Town is a great example where I think the only change that we made on that course is that we reduced the bounciness of the greens because that course was all about hitting the ball off into empty space and then gravity coming along and making the ball fall back. And so we had to reduce the bounciness of the greens. But that also feels more just like a mini golf course, like some might have really thick carpet and some might have thinner carpet. But we try to avoid messing with the physics at all just so that it's consistent and it forces us to not fall into the trap of like creating that perfect shot that we want to happen. It allows for some of that imperfection and that's what allows for what you were also just saying about the sort of like easy to pick up but difficult to master. That's where the people who really, really want to get in and master a particular course, they can really sort of like fine tune every single one of those, you know, until they get that perfect score. And yeah, a lot of the really serious players, they hit like 2600 par on the hard courses. It is like none of us on the team can hold a candle to the really hardcore players. But but yeah, but again, that is one style of play. And we're trying to better support that style. And we think about those players, but we also try to make sure that each hole is fun and doesn't require you to be a master to enjoy it.

[00:27:39.619] Kent Bye: Have there been any tournaments for people to play?

[00:27:42.060] Lucas Martell: Oh yeah, there's a ton of tournaments. I don't believe that we are running any currently on our own Discord server, but there's a bunch of different communities that do that. And so, yeah, there's a ton of communities that have really popped up around this. And a lot of them are also kind of around certain communities. Like I know there's a Facebook group, but that tends to be a slightly older crowd. There's some folks that are much more competitive. There's some folks that are kind of rallied around certain industries where, yeah, like different companies have actually... hosted like team retreats in there, or there's a bunch of people from the animation world who actually get together and play fairly often. So they've got their own server and everything. So I think that some of that was also a bit of luck because we have a, have you played multiplayer yet?

[00:28:20.088] Kent Bye: No, I just played in the middle of the night by myself. I tried to join a match. It was like 3 AM Pacific time and it didn't connect. And I was like, all right, I'm just going to go to bed. So I've only played solo so far.

[00:28:29.867] Lucas Martell: Okay, yeah. I mean, one other thing that you probably haven't seen yet is that the game uses kind of a novel room code system where all you have to do is just choose the name of a room and that will connect you with people. So you don't have to send invites, you don't have to be friends with anybody. So the nice thing about that is that it has kind of inadvertently allowed a lot of those communities to pop up because someone can post up on a Discord forum or something to just say like, oh, I'm going to be in South by Southwest. I will be in SXSW in 10 minutes playing on Coyote Valley or something like that. People can just join in. All they have to do is type in South by Southwest and they'll be connected with you. Again, that wasn't necessarily the reason that was done. I think the reason that was done was just because I had never done a multiplayer game before, and that just seemed like the easiest way to let people connect. But yeah, there's been a lot of positive repercussions with going with such a simple system like that to allow people to connect, especially if they know each other or have a shared interest.

[00:29:26.246] Kent Bye: It sounds like it's almost like a hashtag. So when you create a room code, does it persist so that if someone enters it in, then it spawns up? And then if multiple people are in there, then they'll automatically just have this persistent place to go just to see if there's anyone there or not?

[00:29:41.041] Lucas Martell: Well, that's the nice thing. You can use it like that. So if you have a room that you're always going to be in room Kent. Now, the one thing is that if someone else tries to use the same room code, they might accidentally kind of get into your same thing. So all rooms like no rooms are technically persistent, but you can always get into any room. It's just a question of anyone happens to be there. So if you publicly say, hey, I'm in room Kent, And I'll be there every Tuesday evening or something like that. People could just hop in. A lot of streamers use it that way. But you could also do it where if you've got a, you know, you send a calendar invite to a friend of yours or whatever, you just know, oh, we'll be in room Kent if only the two of you know that. You know, if you want it to be a little bit more secure, you can just add, we'll be in Kent 853 or something like that. So there's a lot of different ways that people can use a simple system like that, depending on what it is they're trying to do.

[00:30:28.519] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, as I was playing through, for the most part, I was getting over par and I probably played through like four or five courses and I did happen to get one hole in one, which felt very satisfying. And then I think I replayed it a number of times. And so there was this really cool mechanic to replay different shots and to teleport around. And so there's this sense of you did something and you want to relive it in some ways. And so maybe you just give me a sense of like when you started to add some of these features of the replay to watch what you did.

[00:30:58.686] Lucas Martell: I'm trying to remember if replay was something that was in there from the very beginning, but it was one of the first features that was added. And I think a lot of it was because we realized that when you hit that hole in one shot, you want to be able to see like how you did it. Or some folks also use that. Like if the person in front of you does a really awesome shot, like how do you do it? You can actually replay and you can see exactly what little spot on the green that they hit and how hard they hit it. And you can try to recreate that exact thing. So it's also a communication tool a little bit. But that might have been there from the very beginning. And if not, then it was like it was within the first six months. The other nice thing, too, is that that became sort of the basis for a lot of people to be able to share trick shots or to be able to record a video and share it with their friends or grief for their friends. But like, I did this really easily. What's your problem? Why can't you get this right? So. mini golf seems to bring out the trash talk vibes a little bit. It's just like you really want to sort of like rib your friends a little bit when you're in there. Like for a lot of folks, yeah, the funnest way to play mini golf is just with a very slight bit of friendly animosity because it's a real, yeah, real fun way to play.

[00:32:02.591] Kent Bye: And when I'm thinking back to the sounds and the sound design, I remember the click being so distinct as a moment when you're hitting the ball and probably some haptics to give it a little extra kick and to really make it feel like I'm hitting the ball. But I don't remember any specific music or sound design, but I imagine that there is and just was more of at an unconscious level. But coming from a sound background, I'm wondering if you could elaborate on both the sound design of the experience, but also the music that you have in there.

[00:32:29.625] Lucas Martell: Yeah, I was a sound designer for a little while. So although I'm not doing it on any of the newer courses, which, by the way, have you gotten to play any of the newer courses, like the DLC, at all? No, I didn't buy any DLC yet, no. Yeah, we'll have to get you some codes for those. Because the great thing about the DLCs is that there's a big difference between what we were able to do with just two or three people, which was what all of those original courses were, versus now the full team of 35 people. So I will say that the sound design and the world building order of magnitude larger and more elaborate. But I do think that one of the big things that I always think about with the sound design is trying to sort of like treat it as a world building element. And so we do tend to go a little bit less what I would call gamey, a little less casino-y, and we tend to go more naturalistic with it. So it really feels like when the ball bounces off of a wood border or something like that. You feel this nice little chunk, but you also get that too, like if you've got a shot where you're doing like five banks to like try to do some crazy trick shot, it just gives you this very almost, it's almost ASMR a little bit that it kind of gives you this little dopamine hit as you just really hear the ball doing all of those things. So yeah, a good bit of time was spent just like I recorded all of the original sounds of the ball rolling across different surfaces and just trying to get the tactile feel of that. But then also just the environment of, yeah, you want an ambient track that really puts you in the place, but it also sort of like as you go closer to certain things, like maybe there's a piece of equipment that needs to have a certain hum. I think 8-Bit Lair was one of the courses that came out more recently, which is set in sort of like an 80s skyscraper with a supervillain trying to digitize all of the people in the world, basically. But there was something very nostalgic about that sound of like the old Commodore 64 like booting up or like the DeGaussian sort of thing, like just all those little things that really Most other games wouldn't necessarily think so much about that, I think, because they would be more focused on the action. But I think that our game, because it's more about the world sort of exists and it's something that you can go around and see and experience, I think that it just does tend to cater more to an ambient atmosphere and a lot of those details that yeah it's just kind of a fundamentally different thing that a lot of games are doing that do tend to be more action focused i'd also want to give a shout out to chris raymond our composer who similarly i think has also just found a really really good balance because each of the tracks for all the courses music wasn't originally in the game i think that started around course five and then we went back and added it to all the previous ones but he has gotten so good at being able to come up with a piece of music that fits the environment that really puts you in the right mood, but is also able to simultaneously kind of fade into the background and become almost an ambient element. Because if you're playing a course in a group of people, especially you can easily be on a single course for an hour. And if you hear a three minute song looping, what would that be? Sort of like a 20 times, like you will really feel it, but he's managed to, uh, Find a way to compose some really, really amazing music that fits the courses, but also doesn't sort of like get stuck in your head in a bad way. So yeah, it's an interesting challenge for a composer.

[00:35:39.370] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely remember more of the Foley recreation of the sounds and, you know, hitting and everything. And so, and more of the ambience, but yeah, I'll have to go back and pay attention a little bit more to the music.

[00:35:49.823] Lucas Martell: That's actually good, though, if you kind of didn't notice it, because it definitely affected you, but it didn't unduly draw your attention. So that's exactly what he's trying to do.

[00:35:57.006] Kent Bye: Yeah, it wasn't at the forefront. It was much more the world and the interactions. And going back, I'm going to either change to the smooth locomotion or with the stick or to kind of fly around, just because I feel like I really enjoy observing the world and teleporting to me was frustrating because I understand that's for people by default would want to have a comfortable experience. But I'm comfortable enough with stick locomotion or flying around that I want to preserve the integrity of really experiencing the whole context of the world and the ways that you're using these concentric circles floating up in this kind of hologram fashion to draw your attention to the next action. Yeah, there's a number of different times where you have to really direct or guide attention with like arrows pointing to different ways. And so, you know, maybe just kind of talk around like you're in this virtual space, you can move all around. But yet sometimes there's kind of like a true north where you should be aimed towards where the next hole is. And so all the different ways that you're trying to guide people with these, I guess, augmented reality like things. indications that are showing you, but also giving you the capability to get the giant view and other maps and all this other kind of metadata about the world and looking at your wrist to see what the PAR is. And so there's lots of information that people want at any given time. And so maybe you could just talk about that design of the information architecture that you have to present to people.

[00:37:23.140] Lucas Martell: Yeah, that's always a challenge because like I mentioned earlier that I think that the simplicity is something that we are always striving for and we're trying to do as... We want to be as light touch with a lot of that stuff as possible but at the same time we need to support different play styles and some people really want to know exactly what hole they're on and exactly what the par is and how many strokes over or under they are so we want to have all that available. I think in general, what we try to do is to create some easy way of accessing that information, but it's not just always sort of in your face as much as possible. So I believe that like the wristwatch is a great example of sort of like that you don't see it until you want to know that. Then you can just look at your watch and it pops up, but it's not up all of the time. similarly i think that even some of those other ones that you're talking about of like having the concentric rings around the balls some of that is really useful because when the ball gets out of your sight there's actually sort of like this kind of like the sonar thing that will appear that will just help you see because a lot of times you're putting blind a little bit or the ball goes into like a shoot or something and you wouldn't be able to see you exactly where it's at without being able to follow it but If you were in real mini golf, you'd just be looking around, wondering kind of what's happening exactly. But by being able to do that, we can accentuate sort of like, yeah, exactly what's going on and show, no, no, your ball is actually rolling through this chute. You can't see it because it's behind a wall, but it's literally going through this whole thing. So We also have it so that you can turn off some of those elements. But like, yeah, the ball trail, the concentric rings around there. I think actually the arrow to the next hole was something that, to be honest, now that I sort of think about it, I don't know that we really need that anymore. I think it was necessary maybe more from the beginning when people were a little bit more new to navigating VR. But now it does sort of just point the direction to your ball whenever, but oh, even that is a good example though, that the arrow to your ball only appears when the ball is off screen by like a good direction. So if you're totally pointing in the wrong direction, it says this little tiny arrow that appears like in your periphery. You can't actually really see it, but it's like, oh yeah, just this little arrow that sort of shows like, oh, where you're supposed to be going. And I would also say that I think especially in the newer courses, actually, this was around from the beginning, but we've kind of started calling it the walkabout path, where we think a lot about just how the world guides you and the idea that the hole and the location that that's at on the green should present a pathway for you to get to the next hole. And that's this more like this good layout design. It feels like, oh, it feels like there's a flow. And so if I walk to the cup, I'm going to be able to see the path that will take me up to the next hole and everything. So a lot of that actually kind of like falls into the world design. And we do think a lot about, yeah, how do people get from one hole to the next and sort of like yeah trying to even create a lot of opportunities on those so that as you're walking along that path you might get a really big reveal moment where you step through a door and finally like see an environment but even the way it sort of reveals itself to you is carefully designed to give you the right sight lines at the right moment.

[00:40:25.549] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I'm wondering if you would be willing to go into like the series of collaborations that you've had, because it seems like you've done a lot of really interesting collaborations with different intellectual property and from the immersive space. Meow Wolf is obviously a big player and there's also Labyrinth and, you know, just kind of step through like this turning point when you started to think about like expanding out what you were doing and doing these collaborations with a variety of different intellectual properties.

[00:40:51.997] Lucas Martell: Yeah, so I think that doing some of the license stuff, the collabs and everything, that probably started, we did eight, so the game launched with four courses. We added four more that were just part of the base game, and then we did our first DLC. And I think that it was right after that first DLC where we were curious, like, will this work? Like, would people buy more courses for this game? And once that was successful, I think that we had had it in our heads that it would be fun to try to do some licensed stuff and some collaborations. But once that first DLC, it was clear that people wanted more of that. Like, yes, just keep making more. We'll happily pay for it. That's when we started reaching out to a few different people. The very first one we did was Jim Henson's Labyrinth. which was a big gift, but that's also kind of a unique property because it's still owned by Henson. They're not owned by a larger studio or anything, and so it's still independent, technically. And so we'd known a few different people that worked there. And actually, Michelle Martel, no relation to me, ironically, but she came on to help out with some of the licensing stuff, and she had actually worked for Henson way back in the day. So that was a very easy, friendly reach out for her. And then once we had done Labyrinth, then it made it so much easier to reach out to other people. So after that, we did Myst, the 90s video game from Cyan. They have been super fun to work with and have... I think that they've actually really enjoyed working with us because they kind of get to be a little bit irreverent with their own IP, which is something that would not fit with the tone of their games. So if you play the Myst course, like the fact that we sort of like bulldozed little bits of Myst Island and put a mini golf course, and then even the fox hunt, which is the hard mode sort of puzzle thing that kind of goes into a little bit of the backstory about this third brother that we just like added to their lore. It was just really, really fun to get to play with them. And then let's see, after that, I'm trying to remember the order that they came out next. I believe it would have been Meow Wolf was the third one, which is, you should definitely, yeah, we have to get you a code for Meow Wolf because that one is a super trippy, I mean, as you would expect, really, really sort of like, there's a lot of different mechanics, there's a lot of unexpected stuff, and I think that one one of the things that we always think about with whenever we're doing a licensed thing is what does this license sort of let us do that we couldn't do on our own? And I think that we could have done something like Meow Wolf on our own, but it would have just been a head scratcher for people. And I think the fact that it was Meow Wolf, like enough people knew what Meow Wolf was going into that. They were like, like, I have like, no, no, prepare yourselves because you are like you don't know what to expect. And I think that it gave us the license to do some really just fun unexpected things and that one was particularly fun because we both did it with the world design but also the gameplay design where there was a lot of holes that admittedly it's probably not a great one for people to compete on because the first time you play through you step up to the tee and you have no idea what's going to happen when i hit this object and then you do and your ball splits into like a rainbow of seven different balls And it actually calculates which one is closest to the hole and gives you that one as the hole. So, yeah, there's ways of like it refracts your ball. We do that a couple of different times. But then there's also one where you hit into I'm very, very like spoiler alert. But I think this one really once we talked about this with Katie Kennedy, who's the creative director at Meow Wolf, who worked with us on the Meow Wolf course. came up with an idea that looked like a very traditional mini golf hole where you put it into the creature and then there's another end of the creature where you expect it to come out. Well, instead you put in and then you actually have to warp to your ball or it opens its mouth. You go in and you find out you're actually in the stomach of this sort of like worm-like creature with a couple of other creatures that are like playing poker in there. and just like completely like once we got that it was like okay this is where we're going and it's just like just bonkers have fun with it but like constantly be surprising people and taking something that people expect and then just like inverting it and doing something very very different the next licensed one that we did was wallace and grommet that was kind of a fluke how that happened because a couple of friends of mine at draw and code in the uk another vr development studio They'd come to our South by Southwest party. This must have been two years ago. It was actually when we were announcing the Meow Wolf course. And they had just brought over a friend of theirs that they just met from the UK who happened to work at Aardman. And he just came to our event that was actually at a local mini golf course. There was no screens, no VR or anything, but we just hit it off. And they mentioned that, you know, Wallace and Gromit was available. And so we flew over to Bristol and actually met with a bunch of the folks over there and So many of us come from the animation world that we had a lot of deep ties and deep love of Wallace and Gromit. So that was kind of a no brainer for us to say yes to. And also on the mini golf side of things, there was just sort of like the contraption element of Wallace and Gromit was like the perfect tonal fit for mini golf. And then just a couple of months ago, we released Viva Las Elvis, which that was interesting because that was the first time that we had ever done something that wasn't sort of world-based. And what that did for us that was really sort of interesting was that it kind of gave us a window into the world that you're in is actually kind of like a 70s era of Vegas. But there are so many bits of memorabilia and so many holes that are sort of the... We kind of call it like the Vegas fever dream version of Elvis. So there's one hole that's on a giant guitar, another hole where you actually go into like a chapel for like, you know, like a wedding. The final 18th hole is it like a neon Graceland? And there's like a whole bunch of different knots, different songs and different things that he did. But what made that course very interesting for us was that it was kind of a way to to experiment with stepping outside of the straight world aspect of it and get a little bit more, psychedelic's not quite the right word, but sort of like a little bit more fever dream, a little bit more sort of like these big set pieces that are very Elvis, they're very Vegas, but it kind of has that, yeah, that theme park atmosphere a little bit more so than being like a true, true representation of like a real world place. But yeah, so all of those super fun, very, very different vibe. And I think going back to what I'd said previously, I think the great thing about doing some of the licensed stuff is that I don't know that we could have done Vegas, but it wouldn't have been nearly as cool or nearly as original. Something that we often think about for, especially when we're doing our own courses, but this also applies to the licensed course, but we almost call it like the walkabout twist. A good example of that was we did Around the World in 80 Days. We did a Jules Verne series. And we had thought about the more traditional, oh yeah, you could just have a whole like, here's Paris, here's Calcutta. You can kind of like go to a bunch of different locations. And ultimately what we felt like, okay, that kind of becomes just like a little montage. And like each of those places is kind of interesting, but it feels like, each of those could almost be their own course and so what we leaned into instead was the travel aspect of it and so it's the eiffel tower but you're playing on the eiffel tower as if it were a airport for lighter than aircraft so you're just playing on the top like three floors but it's got like the metal detectors but they're these big gigantic victorian metal detectors and you know all of the baggage are these giant steamer trunks and you have you know just a whole bunch of different gimmicks that are sort of leaning into sort of like modern day airports, but sort of like retroactively sent back to like 1890. And that's sort of like the twist thing that we've really started leaning into is sort of like there's a straightforward way of doing it, but what's a slightly more interesting or just different take on this that makes it more unique and something that people aren't going to experience in another game that just makes it a bit more ours and a bit more specific.

[00:48:31.618] Kent Bye: Yeah. And notice that you have the DLC when it comes to the courses, but there's also like these avatar packs. So when you're in a social context, you can get some avatars that are often connected to one of these different DLCs. I don't know if they're separate or connected or you get bonus packs or they're completely unconnected and you have to get the avatar separate, but maybe you could talk about some of the other identity based monetization options that you've integrated into Walkabout Mini Golf.

[00:48:58.470] Lucas Martell: So the DLC courses are really the main thing. The only other option that we have in there are there are three DLC packs. So I believe that if you play every course that we launch has at least a couple of avatar options that come along with the course. Similarly, there's 18 lost balls that you can find in every single course, as well as a putter that's unique to that course that you get by doing a fox hunt sort of like. a treasure hunt on the hard version of the course but that's been included like wallace and gromit if you buy the wallace and gromit course you also get the wallace and gromit characters that you can be the avatars of but then more recently we just launched three different avatar packs that is fraggle rock dark crystal both jim henson properties and then we also did exploding kittens which is also really really fun like rainbow ralph and cat has become kind of a bit of the most popular one because every time he talks a rainbow like vomits out of his mouth so they're just very yeah they're they're very very fun so that's been very recent that's the first thing that we've dipped into that wasn't just a course but yeah our our model is definitely kind of old school a little bit and that sort of each course you can buy they're about they're 3.99 We try to keep them as low cost as possible so that as many people can play them as are possible. There's also, I believe now, 32 courses in the game and we've got, you know, we're already working on stuff well into 2026. So we tend to work about 12 to 18 months ahead. We just have to because of the number of courses and the number of things that we're doing. But yeah, so our model is definitely a little bit old school in that you buy the course and then you get all this stuff with it. And that's proven to work really, really well for us and to be a very good value because it also we're at an age of subscriptions. And I will say that even though some people have actually asked for a subscription just so they can get quick access to everything, and we've always said that if and when we do something like that, we're still going to keep this existing model where if you want to just buy the course, just buy that course and then you own it forever. It's just, yeah, we've all been kind of subscriptioned to death a little bit, it feels like. And it's great for certain things and certain types of games, but we just really like this idea. There's something very clean about you want to go to this world, here it is, and then it's yours forever.

[00:51:11.240] Kent Bye: Yeah, just in terms of talking about the broader ecosystem of VR, we're kind of in this weird place where Meta seems to be very focused on promoting their own first-party apps with Meta Horizon Worlds. They've even integrated their own putt-putt golf games. I'm just curious if you want to make any comment. I understand if it's a sensitive topic enough that you don't. I don't want to speak too candidly about everything that's going on, but there's this kind of weird meta promoting their first party apps above and beyond the rest of the ecosystem in the store. There's the App Lab that is also being integrated in there. So there's kind of like these two things that happen where there was like this, curated store where you actually had a storefront that storefront got hidden and then you got the flooding of all the app store labs a lot of shovelware type of experiences flooded in there and then on top of that all these horizon worlds that were starting to be promoted equally to everything so that you get metas own first party apps ends up being the new default thing that you see when you open up the app and the things that they're self-promoting so I'm just curious if you are willing to share any insight in terms of how some of those deeper changes, if you've seen any impact on that, or if you feel like you've been able to cultivate your own audience and you have these DLC models that you have a little bit more resilience to that than maybe others that are just still reliant upon that discovery mechanism of being on the store. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on if there's any tangible impact you can detect and if you have any other thoughts that you'd be willing to share about at all.

[00:52:36.564] Lucas Martell: Yeah, I mean, we could definitely say that, yeah, we saw the impact. I will also say, though, that we felt that impact far less than most other games because, one, we already had sort of a loyal audience because we kept them coming back with our DLC models, then releasing things regularly and building up our own audience. We're fully aware that we kind of lucked into that a little bit. But yeah, definitely the discoverability side of things is extremely hard for especially new games. That's the other side where we also felt a bit of the discoverability hit. However, just because we've been around for four going on five years now, we're a pretty well-known entity in the VR space. being a social game and there's so many people that play the game there's a lot of folks that when a friend of theirs gets a headset they're like oh get walkabout we'll play together so i would say that the social aspect is the other thing that does a lot of that for us but it is i i won't lie it is an extremely difficult marketplace out there right now for a new game because it's it's incredibly difficult to market vr experiences to people to begin with, just because like even being able to do like targeted advertising or something, it's really, really hard. It doesn't really work super well because you don't unlike mobile, you don't know whether someone actually has a headset. How do you get it to the right people? It's still such a niche industry that the storefront is kind of the only way to do that other than influencers and you know people are finding some other ways of doing it but they are nowhere near as effective as having sort of like that curated storefront so i guess yeah all i can really really say on that is that yeah that it is drastically changed the ecosystem almost overnight and yeah there's definitely a few changes so it is a it's definitely a very very rough time for a lot of vr developers out there right now

[00:54:30.834] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I had one other question in terms of the easy and hard and different modes. And it was a little bit confusing because you have some courses where it's like you buy this course, and then there's the hard mode. And it was hard for me to know whether or not, OK, is this like you buy it and you get the pack, or this is a separate, these are two different things? So there seems to be a process of creating like at least easy hard, maybe other intermediary modes, but maybe you could talk about both the design of those two. What do you say is like the difference between easy and hard, but also in terms of DLC, there seemed to be like almost two separate packs that you could buy either separately or, or maybe it's the same. I was a little confusing.

[00:55:10.174] Lucas Martell: Actually, that sounds like more of a note that we need to sort of like clear up in our UI, because now you if you buy the DLC pack, you get both courses. Both courses are included in that DLC. The hard mode is locked. So what you have to do is you have to either shoot under par or you have to collect ten of the lost balls in order to unlock hard mode. But there is a different UI for that where that When you purchase it, it will say locked. And if you actually hover over it, it says that, oh, this is locked, but you have to get a, yeah, you just have to shoot it under par or collect 10 of those lost balls in order to unlock it. So it's just a bit to encourage people to start off with easy mode now. So what we do with hard mode, have you played any of the hard modes actually? I don't know if I have. Yeah. So the hard mode is really, it varies quite a bit. Some courses, well, the number one thing that changes all of those is lighting. So in general, it tends to be that the easy course happens during the day and the hard course happens at night. We actually swapped that for the more recent holiday hideaway, our Christmas course, because that one was sort of like easy was Christmas Eve and then hard was Christmas day with all the packages torn open and Yeah, more like the snowy cold light coming in from the window there. But yeah, in general, it's a big lighting change which drastically changes the feel and the overall atmosphere of the course. And then from a gameplay standpoint, sometimes we've just moved things around a little bit to make it a little bit more challenging. You know, moving the cup, moving the starting point, adding a few more obstacles. There's often at least a couple of holes on every hard course that are drastically different, where it's almost a completely new hole that's been designed just for the hard mode. And then there's even a couple where we do things like on Mount Olympus and Alfheim are two courses where it actually plays in reverse. you go one direction for easy and then in hard mode you actually start in like all the cup and tea positions are sort of inverted which creates a whole bunch of like it is a completely different gameplay experience that we find that the hardest one to design is always the easy course because you want to make it fun and you want to make a challenge but getting that balance just right is a lot more tenuous and hard mode I will admit that probably there's a good number of hole designs that we just find were too hard and like, okay, well that's the hard mode. Like how do we actually scale this down to be more easy and more fun and more accessible? So I don't want to say that hard mode designs itself because there's definitely a lot of work that goes into it, but there are usually a couple holes that we get for free just because they're brutally hard when we first come up with them and then, then they just get bumped to the hard mode.

[00:57:36.727] Kent Bye: Nice. That's really quite interesting. Great. Well, as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential for virtual reality and this type of world building and social dynamics and interaction, what the ultimate potential of this medium might be and what it might be able to enable.

[00:57:53.120] Lucas Martell: Yeah, I mean, I'll actually give maybe an anecdote that we hear from a lot of people is that there are a good number of people. So I think about 55% of the games played in Walkabout are multiplayer, which is huge for something like that. But that still means that 45% of the people are playing solo like yourself. The game is absolutely designed to work for both, and we hope that it's a really engaging experience for people playing solo. That said, there is something about the social and the multiplayer aspect of it that the thing that we have heard from a whole lot of people is the ability it is given for them to connect with people that maybe aren't in their lives anymore, that they don't live close to, so they don't get to see very often. There is something about, I'd highly recommend going, I'd even love to hop into a game with you at some point because there is something about being in a virtual space with someone else. It feels more like being in the room with them than even if you were to see their actual face on like a FaceTime call or something like that. So it is a... it feels like you are exploring together and even just being able to sort of like to see where they're at. And I mean, their avatar, you can see what they're looking at. You still see their mouth moving. It might not actually show their facial expression, but it's amazing how much you can get out of just the position of their head and a couple of little details. And also you could see their hand as well. So, so, so much comes of the body language comes through. And especially if it's someone, you know, like when I'm playing with my dad, like I know his facial expression and so or like I can see like what he does with his head a little bit. And I know exactly sort of like what he's doing and thinking that you get a lot of that nonverbal communication that happens. So to me, I think one of the most interesting sides for me is how the social and the multiplayer factor can sort of like can help reconnect people in a way that, frankly, I think that social media can't because social media is almost more performative. It's more about, you know, putting something out into the world. You're presenting something to the world, whereas getting into sharing a VR experience is more about it's more of a way to truly connect. It's almost more like there's we've got a lot of people who have met in Walkabout and become engaged or married, like the number of folks who have written to us who have talked about how they've reconnected with their dads in a really big way. We've also had a lot of people who are in nursing homes or people who have struggled with social anxiety, or maybe they're not able to leave the house for whatever reason, who they have found a way to sort of reconnect with people and sort of find some stuff it's like that was never the what we were designing it for but now that we've heard so many of those stories we definitely think about that a lot more as we're designing new courses and trying to keep those in mind but i do really think that that's one of the big potentials that we're just starting to scratch the surface of how how vr really can connect people more and give you an actual sort of like a genuine sort of yeah human connection with friends or sometimes even people that you don't know. Like I said, a lot of people do meetings and stuff and walk about. So yeah, it's, it's super cool to, to have accidentally found ourselves on the edge of this. So yeah. Awesome.

[01:01:08.698] Kent Bye: And is there anything else left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[01:01:13.062] Lucas Martell: Uh, no. Yeah. Just thank you so much for chatting with me and yeah. Hope to hope to see you in the game.

[01:01:19.005] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to diving much more deeper into Walkabout Mini Golf. It feels like it's something that's always been on my periphery of meaning to look into it, dive into it. So I'm glad I had this chance to have this interview set up so that I could have the excuse to finally go check it out. And I just found it so rich and deep. And I'm really looking forward to diving into all these different DLCs and to see how there's a kind of spatial storytelling and also a journey that you're taking people on through these interaction designs and sound designs and all of the spatial journey that you're taking people on. And yeah, it just seems like a really rich and deep game that I'm really looking forward to seeing where you're taking it. And also all these games that you have coming up, like you're treating it like a TV show, like having the next series that are coming out. So just all the DLC content that's in the pipeline is really also quite exciting to see what might be coming here in the future. So thanks again so much for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down. Yeah.

[01:02:11.149] Lucas Martell: Thanks for having me.

[01:02:12.580] Kent Bye: So that was Lucas Martel. He's the original solo developer and creator of Walkabout Mini Golf and the founder of Mighty Coconut Studios, which now has like 33 people that are working on this full time. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, I am just confused. completely blown away by Walkabout Mini Golf. And I'm so glad that I took the time to just do a complete binge watch and experience all of the 33 different courses that have been released so far. There were 25 DLC courses that have been released and each of them take around 15 minutes just to play the easy mode. If I'm just playing by myself and checking out how the evolution of the courses evolved, I play them in the order that they were released just to get a bit of a sense of how the design has continued to develop and their focus on the world building, but also just the different mechanics that you start to see show up in some courses and then they become an entire course focus later on. And so it was really just fascinating to catch up with Lucas just to hear a little bit more of his own design philosophy and, you know, starting from this world building first, really building out the world. And from there, starting to map out the course layout and incorporating different specialists from the theme park realm and Imagineers who are starting to do this type of placemaking and course layout that is leveraging a lot of these other lessons that are coming from the realm of the theme parks. Also just the way that the stories are being told, either referencing stories that have already been told, but also like using the Fox hunt to add additional context so you can learn more about the world or finding the golf balls so you can unlock the hard mode. As I played through all of the 33 different courses, I took a tally for my record just to see like about half of them I was able to get under par. And I imagine if I played for longer, I'd be able to get better and then eventually get underneath all of the courses under par. But there were some of the holes where they have those do or die holes. And then you basically are trying to get under par and then either you get it or you don't. And then that, can really tank your score. So as I was playing through at least this first time, those different types of holes were more frustrating than enjoyable, but I think there's lots of different people that as you play it over time, it is this skill level that you can get better and better, and it is a marker so that you can measure yourself against your own best scores or as you're playing with other people. So it does sound like that this model of having DLCs has been quite successful for walkabout mini golf. And you know, the fact that they were basically releasing a new course on average, every couple of months for the last four and a half years, to a certain extent, they've had a little bit of resilience into all the different broader changes that are happening with the XR ecosystem. Lucas said it there at the end that there is quite a lot of significant impact on discoverability just with all the changes that Matt has been making, but Because they've been consistently releasing this DLC content, they have a lot of fans that are continuing to support all the different courses that they're coming out with. So as I played through, you know, there are different types of genres that they start to categorize them into in terms of like Lost Cities, the Jules Verne, the Evil Lair. They have big placards for their original IP that they worked with, including Labyrinth and then Myst. and then Meow Wolf, Wallace and Gromit, and then they're showing Mars Gardens in that same realm of other IP, but I believe that's like their own IP that they're building, and then Viva Las Elvis. They also have a series of evil layers with the laser layer, ice layer, and then the 8-bit layer. Those are really mechanics-focused courses where they're focusing on new novel mechanics, but it's also really quite interesting to go into this evil layer, and it's really robust world-building. I think over time, their world building and placemaking process has got a lot more refined. I think you can really see it in Mount Olympus, which for me is one of the most majestic of the courses that they've done so far. And that just got released on March 6, 2025. But each of them on their own right have been able to create really transportive places that you're able to go into. One of my favorite courses that I had a chance to play through was Mars Gardens, just because You're on Mars, you're in this geodesic dome with all these gardens and just had some great music and also just really good course design. And so I did also have a chance to play through some of the different social features as well. And that's also a lot of fun to be able to play with other people. And I noticed that when I was just playing through, I was just pushing the trigger button in order to teleport to Mars. the next hole just because I really wanted to check out each of the different holes. But as I am playing with other people, there's a lot more time to look around and to really enjoy the worlds that they've created and to also have other people notice things that I missed the first time. So that's been also a lot of fun to start to play through all these different courses with friends and family. I think each of the Lost Cities have really great world design and world building. I also really enjoyed the Jules Verne worlds, especially the journey to the center of the Earth where you're kind of going down deeper into the Earth. And the Raptors Cliffs that also just got released is also really quite solid. Like I said, the ones that were coming out more recently, again, just all around really quite enjoyable to play through. The other thing that just worth mentioning is like there's these different modes. So the mini mode is on bogeys Bonanza as well as laser layer. And then the Venice in order to do that, they also had to implement the low gravity mode because they needed to lower that. So you can also have that, which can be a little bit confusing to find because you have to go into at the shack when you're selecting it, you have to collect on the special settings and then select the custom. And then in the custom, there is the low gravity mode that you can turn on and It's a little confusing because the mini mode is just a view that is there. But I think they probably are hiding it a little bit more because, like Lucas said, it can start to mess up how you hit the ball because as you go into these different modes, then the gravity and the physics are a little bit different. And so it's kind of changing the mechanics of your swing and movement. When you do that and go to other modes, then it messes up a little bit of your calibration and kind of have to recalibrate the way that you're having a consistent stroke through all these. They also have like an Exploding Kittens special fox hunt. The fox hunt is in each of the different courses, you can basically find these different puzzle pieces and at the end you get a special putter. In the Exploding Kittens one, there's a double fox hunt that is in the laser layer, which is now a part of the new base. For me, I really enjoyed the different layers just because the puzzle mechanics were really quite unique. Some of the different courses that have very unique gimmicks or things where there's kind of unique puzzle mechanics or at least doing something that's a little bit different. With the base game, Tethys Station has a lot of those do or die holes and it's not one that's easy to just out of the gate as a casual player start to compete because either you get it or you don't, a lot of those types of holes. but also the upside town, which was really quite unique and interesting in terms of playing with gravity and playing upside down and hitting things sideways. And that's certainly up there in terms of the unique type of gameplay mechanics. Meow Wolf is also the other one that Lucas had called out in terms of having very unique, different types of novel mechanics of that world. And Again, it was like you are in the hole and you're like, what do I even do here? Because you're like a little bit lost. And so that's probably one that's good to play for the first time with other friends and family, just because it's something that it is a little bit difficult to really know what's going to happen, but also one that is just really surprising. Another one is Myst in terms of a lot of the puzzle games, a lot of the puzzle-like mechanics that you would expect from Cyan Games, but with the walkabout twist. So yeah, I'm just overall, I'm really incredibly impressed with Walkabout Mini Golf and so glad that I had a chance to really dive into all the stuff that they've created so far and highly recommend that you check out the game if you haven't so far and to check out some of the DLC packs. In the show notes, I'm going to include like a table of all the different DLC packs and which ones are actually now included within the base game, but also the release dates. So it's listed in the order that each of these had come out and there's these different genres that each of these are a part of as well. So yeah, yeah just a really incredible game and also just to see that they've really bootstrapped themselves into creating a really successful business so that's all they have for today and i just want to thank you for listening to the voices of vr podcast and if you enjoy the podcast then please do spread the word tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the patreon this is a list of supportive podcast and so i do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring its coverage so you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com voices of vr thanks for listening