Show HN: I made a mini golf in my lunch time | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a mini golf in my lunch time

paper-golf.netlify.app

174 pointsheyarviind285 comments

I like that you can hear the club swing and contact on higher rolls, but I NEED to hear the ball hit the bottom of the cup when I sink the putt.

Also, maybe some optional crowd noise if you hit it past the hole or hit it in the wrong direction due to an over-roll.

In case anyone else has trouble:

1. The black circle is the ball; you roll the dice to determine the amount of moves

2. after the dice roll, the allowed moves will be shown - as yellow squares near the ball; this is a very faint yellow and easy to miss

3. to move the ball, roll the dice then click on the faint yellow squares near the ball (or further away if you rolled a 6).

To add:

You might need to zoom out a bit to see the whole map, the hole was hidden for me initially

Alternatively:

- Click barely noticeable hamburger menu in the top left

- Click "How to Play"

Great project. Makes me think on a digital version of this https://gladdendesign.com/products/paper-apps-golf

Yes i am inspired from this :D

It might be worth putting something on the page directing people to Gladden's original.

But neither seem to compare favorably to Golf Peaks[1]. Instead of rolling dice you're given a hand of cards to play, making it into a puzzle!

[1]: https://afterburn.itch.io/golf-peaks

Gladden's is a physical game and great for face-to-face multiplayer.

The only negative point of Golf Peaks is that it's too short !

There's a nugget of something clever here but it's missing something, there's too much luck and not quite enough skill for a golf game.

My first thought was selecting from various dice with different distributions to represent the various golf clubs.

My second was that a hex grid would offer a much better variety of options. The square grid only has 1 or 2 useful directions that can bring you closer. A hex grid would typically have 2 to 3 useful directions.a hex

Then I thought, this sounds like a good base for a board game, did a search and turns out there already is one that uses that formula! https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6370656/roll-in-one

For skull just have the old aim and then hold a button for power. That is what I was expecting.

Doesn't work in Android Chrome. Clicking does nothing.

Edit: figured out what was wrong, I had bedtime mode turned on which desaturated the screen, making the light yellow impossible to see. Suggestion: make the highlight more visible/accessible

I couldn’t see the highlights either on my first hole. Or maybe there were no valid landing spots, I’m not sure.

I also thought the black circle was the hole, not the ball. Golf balls are normally white, not black.

EDIT: it appears that the highlights (and trails) disappear if you scroll up and down a few times (iOS mobile safari)

Or some sort of pulsing on the clickable areas. I reloaded the page a few times before I realized the pale yellow spots were supposed to be clicked. I assumed it was bugged, but I was wrong.

Wow, someone just sent me this post because I also made a golf game inspired by Gladden Design's this week! :D I made my own twist on it a bit, making it use a hex grid because I didn't like how diagonal moves were treated the same distance as orthogonal moves and I added bonuses and skill shots to give the player a reason to take a non-straight line path to the hole and made it a daily game but having a wordle style share score button. I'm surprised how many people saw that video and also all had the same idea that "this would make a great digital game idea" https://golf.jbat.ch/

Hex tiles are a really smart improvement on the game. I do kind of miss the little trees instead of just the dark green color though. :D

I also wonder if the graphics wouldn't make playing easier for color blind folks. :)

Is the roll determined by your position on the board at all? I just ran into a seemingly endless chain of 3 rolls where I was bouncing back and forth between two positions for 15+ rolls.

edit: I kept going for another 10 rolls before bailing out of the loop for one iteration and got back into the cycle again immediately on returning to the start point. ie: I went A-B-A-B...A-C-A-B... where C was also 3 steps away from A and I rolled a 3 on C too). Definitely seems like it's a partially deterministic stroke roll.

You have to move exactly the number of dots shown in the roll.

Trees block you. You can't finish your move on sand or water. You also can't do "knight moves". So you're kind of stuck going straight or at 45 degree angles.

I know that. I was going back and forth between two squares rolling 3 every time for a statistically improbable number of times. I could have chosen a different move but after going A to B to A and rolling 3 AGAIN I was more interested in seeing if that was a fluke or if it was something else happening.

Being able to do that 20+ times makes it really improbable the rolls were truly random numbers hence my question.

> I was going back and forth between two squares rolling 3 every time for a statistically improbable number of times.

For a fair single die, every possible sequence of a given length is equally (im)probable. We tend to notice the ones that are particularly convenient or inconvenient, but they are exactly as likely as any of the less memorable ones.

Yes I know this but also tweaking the weights of rolls to be lower as you near the hole will also be less frustrating to the players.

Had the same issue, but finally gave up.

Ah! I spent an hour today trying to recreate the golf course from gladdendesign too (I ordered one of each of their games when I saw it on youtube)! But I got sidetracked trying to fit perlin noise into the solution, still not sure what algorithm to use to generate similar terrains. Also I kind of assumed copying the game exactly wouldn't be super fair or even legal so I planned on keeping it private.

Heh, I also was inspired to implement the game with some major changes once the video popped up on youtube. I got it working but lost interest when it came to polishing the mapgen and generating interesting maps with the slope mechanic.

Sounds like a job for wave function collapse?

Anyone, if you like this game and you wanna improve it, please consider giving your feedback here -> https://huntlie.com/product/mini-golf?tab=feedback

I should do the following things first:

1) Give credit to Paper's app in next update 2) Convert it to mobile app

Hah! I've been emailing the creator of Paper Golf to ask if he would be ok with me creating something like this! Looks like you beat me to the punch :P

This is fun. Strategy is to get in line with the hole so there's a chance to hole out next shot. Would be more realistic if you could hit any number of spaces up to the die roll. Maybe have different clubs - driver = die roll +3, iron = die roll, putter that can hole out at any distance up to 6 not necessarily in a straight line if you roll that distance or more. So e.g. putter can hole out with knights move if you roll 3 or higher.

I see what you’re saying, but it’s mini golf, so you only get one club.

> be more realistic if you could hit any number of spaces

The docs say that's how it works, but clearly that's not how it was implemented.

"Move straight or diagonally up to the dice value"

Interesting that there's no need to have greens around the hole. In real golf, construction and maintenance of the greens is a primary cost. I play a simplified form of golf in public parks (or any semi-open space) using one club and foam practice balls that won't hurt anyone and only go about 40 yards max. I use lightpoles and trees as targets and chip the ball to hit the pole or tree as holing out. Most parks you can arrange various holes through and around the vegetation and structures.

Hole in 420 strokes! The only path to the target was through a corner of width 1, so I had to get a very specific set of 1s or 2s. But I kept rolling back & forth on 5s & 6s :D

The specificity of the result after such a long time gambling without real reward is oddly satisfying.

420 eh!

It was actually 424, but I think thk rounding was appropriate here.

This is super sweet!

My only gripe is that it doesn't seem to be very desktop friendly. I'm on FF 192.0.2 (64bit) and I can't figure out how to pan or zoom around the play field.

It would also be nice to see a "par" or statistical breakdown of levels compared with other people. The randomness might make this a bit tricky but things like Crypt of the Necrodancer use seeded levels and, presumably, seeded RNGs for other elements of the randomness in levels to make it consistent across players.

Super simple and super effective. Very nice.

If the ball is at 3 squares from the hole and the dices get's a 4, I'd allow to end the game. It's more fun to navigate the obstacles than to try to get the exact number to finish.

I fixed it, if you are close to the hole, you will get exact number to finish the game

Scrolling is wrorking in a weird way in movile Chrome. I can go down but not up.

Why I can't move over water???

I thought the same thing about trees and assumed the dev based the game on my golf skills where going over trees is impossible

Try thinking of it as mini golf/putt putt where the ball only rolls

In the original game, you can only go over trees if you're hitting from the fairway; OP may not have coded that in.

You should be able to go over water at any point, as long as you've got the distance for it.

it's mini golf. it's in the title of TFA as such. in mini golf, the ball only rolls. the ball does not roll across water. it does not roll over trees even from the fairway. if your ball leaves the ground with a putter, something is very very wrong

> if your ball leaves the ground with a putter, something is very very wrong

Ugh, you sound just like the manager of the last seventeen mini-golf places I've been kicked out of. I shall not apologize for my athleticism!

Though I probably should have apologized to the parents of those kids who they had to call an ambulance for.

I think it's more interesting if you have two kind of obstacles, so there are more tricks and path to try (but not as difficult as chess). This looks easy to implement.

Also, as an untested idea, it would be nice to have two dices and be able to select one of them or the other or the sum. Perhaps both dice then disappear, or perhaps the unused dice goes to the next round like in scrabble. The idea is to have more possibilities to think in each step (like make a small jump and aim to a nice diagonal, or go to the shore and hope a big hit next turn). This reduce the nasty effect of getting a 1. But I'm not sure if any of these variants are more fun, and all of them take a while to be implemented.

> more interesting if you have two kind of obstacles

Yeah. As a general rule of game dev, if there is a different icon, then its behavior should be different.

it's mini-golf

Ah, that explains why I thought I was getting very lucky to be able to get a hole in 3, and shortly afterwards, even a hole in 2. Is it possible to get a hole in 1, or are levels constructed so as to prevent that?

It's neat but I soft locked because my roll had no valid moves.

Hmmm... That seems like a valid move needs to exist for all possibilities for every square.

Water should probably be allowed to hit over too, but not in.

how do you hit over water in mini-golf?

By hitting it sufficiently hard

There are videos of people skipping balls off the surface of water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcI9nzsCILI

Yes, but that's not mini-golf.

Also I don't think the ball in that video is skipping, it's bouncing off a rock. Definitely possible to skip though.

Please credit https://gladdendesign.com/products/paper-apps-golf for the original game concept.

i have already given :)

I got generated hole in a tree.

yes fixing that bug

I'd prefer if I had several moves to make after a single roll of the dice.

Also I block html5 auto playback by default which you appear to use for some animation stuff. It'd be great if the game could work without it.

I would suggest 2d6 so that there is some strategy in which direction you need to hit the ball. D6 can be swapped to something else for other clubs

You absolutely need a clearer way of telling us how to play. It was very confusing and it's only because I saw this on HN that I bothered trying more.

Awesome! I watched Gladden Design's video too and loved it. It's great that you've made it accessible! Please consider giving attribution to Gladden Design.

Very cool thanks for building. Would echo some of the other comments about how to play but I figured it out. Is a hole in 1 possible on any holes?

How come after you roll but before you move, the Strokes value at the top shows the current roll value instead of the stroke count? Is this a bug?

Highlighting the valid squares to shoot to would be nice

Just a quick bug report: the "Strokes" counter resets to the rolled number before you click a destination

Random flight lengths and double digit stroke counts for one hole? Finally a realistic game that matches my experience on the golf course.

Not being able to shoot over water is lame.

i am changing this in the next update

I can't hit over the water??

https://ibb.co/TRbGgVx

Great stuff! Thanks for making this. Would love the ability to turn off the sound, but that's a minor nitpick.

PSA: I needed to disable my "Disable HTML Autoplay" Chrome extension in order for the game to work.

Nice but I got stuck near the end. I kept rolling 3 and then the button shakes and that is it.

I just got 13 rolls of 3 in a row. I think there may be an issue with the RNG

”That’s the problem with randomness: you never can be sure.”

https://imgur.com/gallery/dilbert-random-number-generator-uR...

Ha, that's pretty random to me!

I also got something like 12 rolls of 3 in a row. I would definitely check the RNG routine to ensure that it is not biased to the mean (i.e., verify that you are drawing from a uniform, rather than normal, distribution).

A bit intuitive - the instructions should be on the screen next to the map

The strokes does not get updated properly. It needs to be fixed

This is cool! Well done. Where did you get the sound from?

This is a lot of fun. Thank you for making this.

Very nifty idea! And cute, simple visuals

funny enough

Lame.

Hole in 48!

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