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#gimp art

vicekillx
@vicekillx
blue-mue-game
@blue-mue-game

Brand mini golf

I never had the fortune of having that mythical "computer class" in school, where one could play computer games for hours at school, that everyone seems to remember. I didn't even have a family computer for a long time, so I would beg and beg for my mom to take me to the nearby library so I could play games on the computers there.

There were these websites, Nabiscoworld.com and Candystand.com, that had all sorts of shockwave flash games themed around various snack products. The advertising was very in your face but the games were very charming and a good way to waste some time.

I was always partial to the cremesaver bowling game, but another popular set of games were the mini golf games. They all used very similar physics and design, with some courses even just being recycled with a new product slapped on. They're definitely worth checking out now, even for a quick novelty. I believe the flashpoint archive would be the best way. Here's also a quick gameplay video if you're curious.

Anyways, I felt like trying to recreate something along the lines of those mini golf games. I really wanted to focus on making similar graphics. There's a lot of mini golf games out there but what made the old candystand/nabiscoworld mini golf games memorable, to me at least, were those charming visuals.

Creating similar textures for the terrain pieces, like the sand and water, was easy enough. I went to various CC0 sources for the images and scaled them down, using GIMP's built in palette and dithering utilities, and also the seamless tiling utility where needed. From there GIMP also has the "clone tool" which let me draw the textures as patterns.

In blender, I modelled the course ground and walls. I used a shader that reads the height of the ground, applying a lighter color to parts that were higher up. This hopefully makes it easier to read the sloping of the course. Also in blender I modeled some generic "snacks". Originally I was trying to go for a gummy candy ring of some sort but they ended up looking more like those shelf stable chocolate donuts.

The candystand/nabiscoworld mini golf games used a combination of 3D assets and stock imagery for the advertisement portions. Creating my own versions of this has been proving difficult. I need to research more on how to create stock imagery in particular, or at least find some freely licensed stuff that fits. I think I also need to play a bunch of mini golf to get some more ideas for interesting courses.

Where am I going to go with this? I was wanting to make something for coolstation. In byond, the game engine it uses, you can open an internal web browser to use as an interface for stuff like computers and arcade games. But that would take learning to code a functional minigolf physics in html and javascript, which had me banging my head against a wall for a long time. I was also thinking of slapping something together quickly in Godot for fun and putting it on itch.io

Thanks for reading!