Animator and Walkabout Mini Golf course designer Henning Koczy offered a tour of Mighty Coconut's Viva Las Elvis chock full of behind-the-scenes details.
The new paid DLC is available for purchase now on all major VR platforms as well as iOS.
Walkabout's 31st course begins at hole 1 as you pull up to the casino in glittering '70s era Las Vegas. Elvis' path ends at hole 18, putting up the piano into Graceland with stops off along the way at the pool, through the Heartbreak Hotel and into The Jungle Room.
The course is made in collaboration with the rights holders to Elvis Presley's namesake and explores the iconography of "the king" anchored around his presence in a dreamy Las Vegas, as if you've stumbled out of a car into this mirage in the desert held up on struts from the darkness.
The clip from our tour above shows Koczy explaining some of the place-making ideas that anchor Mighty Coconut's regular expansions. Even in this dream-like setting of Viva Las Elvis, details like handrails help ground the player and sell the place, explains Koczy.
I usually record my tours of Walkabout Mini Golf's newest course as a silent camera, putting full focus on one or more of the developers pointing out details as we work our way from hole 1 to 18. For our 25-minute Viva Las Elvis video, though, I recorded my microphone input for a more active Q&A style tour, with Koczy stopping off to pluck guitar strings with me and credit artists developing specific effects, like shiny metal surfaces on casino games and the smoky overhead lights.
The 25-minute path is available here.
If you want to avoid spoilers, check out the tour after you've played through the course yourself. If you've got multitasking up and running you can also play the video in headset as a kind of commentary track.
If you happen to be new to VR in general, you can watch through our full list of tours for a guide to some of the best places you can visit in a headset inside Walkabout Mini Golf. And for those that don't mind spoilers, around the 5-minute mark in our YouTube video is a good spot to drop in and see a really nice detail – the guitar you can strum with your club as you go by.
Walkabout's developers are building up a regular release cadence of about two new courses per season, with the creators also more frequently releasing new props, activities and other tiny details to existing destinations.
Our thanks to Koczy for his time on this tour and for the insights into the challenges of building a place around the iconography of Elvis Presley.
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