Lichenthrope

This is the first game jam game in my list and the first one where the player is also the ball. Golf? by Froggy_Chair was made in 2 days for Mini Jam 84, the limitation was "you are your own ammo". You can walk around and also launch yourself much like a golf ball (this one, and I think a lot of these games are going to probably have their golf balls behave like billiards or pinballs).

You can walk full speed most of the time but on the green the player character slows way way down cause obviously being able to simply walk to the hole would kind of make golfing yourself around pointless. You take a shot by placing the cursor towards your intended destination and holding the mouse button or the space bar to set the power level of the swing, I like this better than the pull-back-and-release mechanic of the last one but it's still more finnicky than a 3-button-press. Another obstacle this game uses to stop the player simply walking to the hole is that when you golf yourself, you leave behind a shadow that also blocks movement until you swing at them, some shadows are also pre-placed around the fields.

Because it's a 2 day game jam game, it feels weird to suggest an improvement but I want to say that having some kind of score for number of swings would be a good easy way to create motivation for getting to the hole in as few swings as possible.

The second game in the lineup is called Golf. Like the first one, also called Golf, it is more of a personal educational project that was published. I'm going to just treat all of the games seriously but with the understanding that they are just free hobby projects and not gonna pick on strange decisions much. Also I want to mention, I don't golf, I've been to a driving range before and I've played mini golf though so I have a good idea what it is like. I think.

I think this is the 3rd level, the arrows are for zooming in and out, the cottage is the home/menu button, you tap or click and pull back from the ball to set power and direction. In a lot of golf games, especially ones that use a touch screen, utilize this mechanic, I don't think I prefer it. The 3 button press of the previous game/ NES Open Tournament Golf inspired games is more fun and more likely to give the kind of taking a deep breath before a shot moment. It really caught me off guard when the sixth and final hole was some kind of billiards like game though. The creator's pages have no information or anything but they made two games about playing pool before this. It is funny to me that the end of this game is basically the creator saying "I'd rather make another billiards game"