Greetings Golf Fans,

We’re delighted to announce that our first major update since entering Early Access is arriving tomorrow but firstly we’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who has bought the game so far. You’re making a leap of faith paying for a new game in Early Access and we really appreciate the support. All of the money we receive is being invested back into the game.

Secondly I just wanted to recap our general plan when it comes to Golf Club Architect releases. With the game being in Early Access we anticipate needing to break save game compatibility as we add the foundations of new systems. We also understand that players don’t want their saves broken constantly and so we have come up with a plan to release 4 big updates a year where we break save compatibility but we will ship many more small updates in between that don’t.

This update is the first big save game breaking update and comes with a host of new features, some of which are described in this post and will be in your hands this Sunday.

Milestones

One of the main problems with the first Early Access version of the game was that we didn’t define or communicate the objective to you, in this update we are beginning to add this content. A new milestone system has been added along with the first 4 milestones. Milestones have criteria that need to be met in order to achieve them and also come with rewards such as cash injections and unlocking of course features.

Don’t worry, if you’re used to playing in Sandbox mode where there are no restrictions at all then this remains true. Milestones are not enabled for Sandbox mode.

Milestone information window:


Milestone goals window:

Course Rating

The next area we have improved is providing direction on how to improve your course, detailing to you it’s current greatness (or otherwise). In this update we have laid the foundations for the Course Rating system.

Much like in real life when a golfer visits a golf course they can leave a review. Golf Club Architect golfers will do the same.



In the new Club Management window you will be able to find information on how your course is currently rated as well as who has left those ratings. Each course will initially be rated in three categories, Beauty, Pace and Happiness.

Beauty is affected by whether the golfers notice beautiful props as they play their round of golf. For example a big oak tree will be especially beautiful and a small tree less so.

Pace rating is determined by whether the golfers can play their round of golf at the speed at which they’d wish to do so.

Happiness is affected by the results of their game on the course. Build a hole where players hit it into the water too much and they’ll become unhappy. Make a hole too easy and they will also become unhappy. Finding the correct balance is key.

Finances

You complained that you were running out of money in Scenario mode too quickly and we here you. We had always planned to improve the finance system in the game but due to your feedback we have brought that forward to the first update.

As well as the rewards for the milestones listed above we have also added a loan system which will allow you to dig yourself out of a financial hole should the worst come to the worst. We have added a tab to the Course Management window allowing you to see what you’re spending your money on as well as take out the aforementioned loans.



Time Scale

In this update we have also addressed the time-scale issues we discovered while implementing loans. Fundamentally time wasn’t moving forward fast enough for the loans to be repaid in a plausible amount of real-world time and this is because the in-game time going through a full calendar cycle.

To address this we have reduced the calendar to 5 days in a month. We feel that this will need to be balanced further in the future and we also think that we might add this as a new game option where, for example, you could even choose to play a full calendar should you so choose.

Notable Tweaks

We have also fixed many bugs and made lots of small quality of life improvements to the game. Here are some of them:

• Green & Bunker presets - Preset shapes for greens and bunkers are now provided to help you kick start your golf course.
• Ambient music - Two ambient music tracks have been added to accompany you during your golf course development.
• Improved terrain surface visuals with normal maps and also green/fairway fringes are now applied automatically.
• Handicaps - AI golfers now have their stats determined by an initial handicap and the distribution of handicaps amongst the AI golfers is far more like real life where there are far few very good and very poor golfers.
• Height Flatten Tool now allows you to select a height with right-click that you wish to paint.
• Hole Shape - It is now automatically determined whether a hole is straight or dogleg

What next?

We’re already planning the contents of the next big update but rest assured that until then we will ship updates fixing any issues found as well as some smaller features. We will have more information about the contents of the next big update in due course.

Thanks for reading,

The Golf Club Architect development team