We’re big fans of Walkabout Mini Golf as it has developed into one of VR’s best reasons to put on a headset. Developers continue building out a rapidly growing collection of available courses but, when it launched in late 2020, the game had just four of them and Seagull Stacks was one with its rocky terrain and birds flying overhead.
Seagull Stacks joined Tourist Trap, Cherry Blossom, and Arizona Modern as Walkabout Mini Golf’s launch lineup. Four more free courses from developer Mighty Coconut have been added to the core game since then — Original Gothic, Bogey’s Bonanza, Tethys Station, and Quixote Valley. A collection of paid DLC add-ons continues to grow as well, with licensed courses for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and Cyan’s Myst as well as collections themed after famous Lost Cities and Jules Vernes’s iconic science fiction works. Atlantis is the next course from Mighty Coconut and we know Journey To The Center Of The Earth and Around The World In 80 Days are in the works too. In addition, the studio is already working on courses that won’t launch until 2024, with future add-ons now priced $3.99 each to keep pace with a larger development effort.
Seagull Stacks Walkabout Mini Golf Course Tour
Lucas Martell and other members of the Mighty Coconut team have been giving us tours of each Walkabout’s course as they talk through the process of developing their standout VR work. With Seagull Stacks now live, you can now walk through the launch lineup of Tourist Trap, Cherry Blossom, and Arizona Modern. Each tour offers insight into how the developers built the course from inspirations and challenges to the tools they used in its design.
With Seagull Stacks, Martell explained how the course sees players ascending across the front nine holes before descending down the back nine. The overall layout teases players with big reveals and relaxing vistas, allowing players to peer down at their upcoming path or look up from below at a gigantic bridge. The course also features the game’s first weather effects — just simple little square snowflakes falling around you — as well as its first wildlife in the form of seagulls soaring overhead.
We’re building a full collection of tours of every Walkabout course with its designers. The playlist embedded below will grow as we add more courses in what amounts to an in-depth overview of design progression in one of VR’s best games.
“It really just breathes a lot of life into a course just to have even a couple of birds flying around,” Martell says. “When we added the ability to fly (just point your putter straight up and push the thumb stick forward and you’ll take off) if you go into the settings menu locomotion speed also affects how fast you fly. We kept coming back to this course because I think we actually set it up five meters per second as the max speed. But that got you just a little bit past the point where you could keep up with every single seagull. It was just so much fun to just fly in formation with the seagulls as they’re winding around all the seagull stacks. That’s actually why that upper limit is set where it’s at.”
We’re continuing to build out the playlist on YouTube with a tour of every course, so subscribe to our channel or check back with uploadvr.com for updates.
