Golf With Your Friends Level Design

A golf course created within the Golf With Your Friends level editor for a Sheridan College Design Week Challenge.


Team: 5

Roles: Level Design

Tools: Golf With Your Friends Level Editor

Timeline: 1 Week


Course Overview

Each team had to select a mood that their course must convey. Our chosen mood was Adventure and the best way we found to convey it was to design our course to tell an epic story.

The course starts in a town, with a burning forest hinting that something is amiss. Hole 2 sees the players traverse through the town proper as the civilians are gearing up to fight back. The 3rd hole has players adventuring through a forest on their way to the 4th hole, where they must navigate their way down a mountain. Hole 5 has the players escaping a lava-filled cave by the skin of their teeth and the final hole sees the players and the civilians working together to take down the T-Rex that was wreaking havoc across the lands.

 My Work On The Project

  • Level Design: Concepted, prototyped, and implemented the final level of the course.

  • Analytical Design: Worked with the team to analyze the key elements of good GWYF course design and how to implement that in our course.

The Design Process

1. Analyze

We started our design process by analyzing what makes for a good GWYF golf course. Through playing multiple courses with an analytical eye, we found many key characteristics that we thought made for a good course.

We used annotated images to help illustrate our points and present our ideas clearly to our peers while presenting our findings.

2. Prototype

Now with our mood intention of “Adventure” chosen, we built a mood board to capture the kind of experience we though “Adventure” embodied. This mood board was also useful to refer back to whenever we had to make a design decision involving whether we were effectively communicating our mood.

We then individually worked to come up with unique design sketches as to come up with as many unique approaches to the challenge as possible.

With these new ideas, our next step was to individually prototype them and see what works and what doesn’t, as well as to learn how to use the level editor. My goal with my prototype was to explore how we could build a golf hole that feels like a boss fight. Through my experimentation, I learned a few things that are necessary for a GWYF boss fight:

  • There should be multiple paths to achieve the goal - it should be up to the player how they want to defeat the boss

  • Big, wide open areas have a few benefits such as extreme player agency, but go against many of the “good level criteria” we established

Rapid Prototype Gameplay

3. Design & Implement

With all of our new knowledge, we each worked individually on a hole, while still working together to ensure our design intention was met across the whole course. We performed playtesting throughout the process, which helped me to tune and redo parts of my level until it was a fan favorite.

Our course received rave reviews from players in categories of:

  • Unified course design

  • Progression

  • Functionality

  • Usability

  • Compelling

Take Aways

  • Experienced building a level for an existing game project, similar to coming on to a project mid-way through development.

  • Worked on a small part of a team project while ensuring the entire project met the design goals.

  • Explored ways to convey moods through level design.