Falkon’s Nest – Golf With Your Friends Map

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If you play golf with friends. I made a map, check it out and give it a rating on the steam community. It’s my first map I’ve ever made for like anything, so be kind and constructive. You can find and subscribe to the map here.

About the Map

This map was the first I’ve ever delved into building a map or doing any sort of editing/creating in a 3D editor. I initially set out to just explore the editor because I had heard how difficult and cumbersome it was to work with. It ended up peaking my curiosity a bit more than usual because I really enjoyed playing the game and seeing a lot of the different features and creative ways others had created maps, I wanted to dig into some of the mechanics so that it would also make me a better golfer. I’m a nerd, especially when it comes to space/cosmos related things, so when I noticed they had an entire category for just “space” stuff with space ships, I started placing them around the map and got some inspiration to build a course around what I was imagining to be a grassy space station in the void playing off my gaming handle and named it, “Falkon’s Nest”.

Gallery of the Map

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Final Note

I did ultimately enjoy making something. I put two nights into building the map as a “wind down” to bedtime (I must be a masochist), so there was no way to test every inevitability of this game engine. Therein, I’ve “beta” tested it myself while building it to ensure that each path and or secret path can ultimately get to the the cup. However, I will note that once I started doing some “stress testing” with my friends I learned all the weird ways balls can get into interesting places. 😉

The gravity wells with pipes create a lot of unpredictability in how to transport a ball consistently every time. Sometimes it will completely launch your ball out of the pipe and other times it’ll properly place your ball at the end of the pipe as intended. There’s also inconsistencies on what pieces of “scenery” or “props” allow your ball to actually rest on it instead of resetting your ball back on the course. This can be very painful when jumping over the spaceships. I hope you learned how to use your jetpack prior to playing the course. 😀

In summation, it was fun, frustrating, but ultimately satisfying to create this map and I hope to make iterations on it to make it better and then maybe make an even more epic maps in the future like some of the brilliant minds I see on the workshop.

Additional Note: About the Golf With Your Friends Editor (GWYF)

The editor is cumbersome. It’s somewhat unintuitive unless you take the time to click around and try to establish the design patterns and thought process that the developers had when they created the tool. On the top left-hand side of the editor you get to choose the different pieces based on type (Floor/Feature/Decoration/etc) and then based on biome (space/forest/volcano/etc). When you choose an object from the left side editor to place in the world and it is selected, you get a new menu in the top right that allows you to manipulate the object in 3D space. This one definitely came with a learning curve for me as I had never really manipulated anything in 3D space before, but I was lucky enough to have had some extensive studies in mathematics and physics as well as computer programming. The educational backgrounds helped ease the time it took to pick up how these functions worked in the 3D space.

There were three different categories of manipulating an object in 3D space. The Location of the object, the size of the object, and the rotation of the object. I found the location and size of the object to be the easiest to manipulate. There is a “SNAP” feature that is almost essential to utilize if you want a functional golf course because it allows you to snap the golf floor and other pieces together so that there aren’t gaps or inconsistencies on the plan of which the golf ball has to roll across. However, if you want to do anything that requires some more advanced movements for the ball, sometimes you have to break the rule I tried to impose on myself on using the snap feature on every object I placed in the game.

I gained a new level of respect for some of the map makers and how intricate and detailed their maps are. I realize now (as I’m writing this post) I didn’t go and look for any tutorials or guides on this before I jumped in, but I was limited to placing one object at a time, manipulating its parameters based on the X/Y/Z grid and rotational parameters that made me with I paid closer attention in geometry. There was no way to copy paste a bunch of items. For example, when I created anything that required going “up” in space on the map, I had to place an object and then change the Y axis of it to match the other tiles manually. This is where some planning and understanding of the grid and manipulating things wasn’t AS painful even though I couldn’t copy paste or continue to deploy floor based on the Y axis from the previous tile placed.

I also had this weird issue at one point where ALL my walls and other assets reset their rotation and replacing it by knowing the exact 90-degree rotation or whatever it needed saved a lot of time in rescuing the map.

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