Dev Log: On Tape
At the end of an NBA 2K game, it plays your highlights back. I've always liked that. Chain Chasers does it now, and you can share yours.
That one idea ended up taking most of the week: replays, a room to keep them in, and ghosts to race. Then I spent a day on what the other chasers say to you.
Instant Replay
Every throw of your round is recorded. When you putt out, the scorecard shows your three best. Picking them was the interesting part. A hole in one should usually win, but a gnarly eagle can be more fun to watch than a boring ace. So the pick weighs spectacle and rarity, not just the number on the card.
It plays back on tape. Tap a highlight and it runs as a VHS recording: the tracking lock, the camcorder readout, the blue screen at the end. Rewind already had that feel, so I leaned into it.
You see exactly what you saw. Your camera, from the release to the basket. The tree you clipped, the sound it made, the way the disc spun out.
The celebration is in it. Celebrations are half the fun, so the replay keeps going through the make.
Putts replay from your putting view, and the rain and wind replay the way they were.
SHARE makes a vertical clip for Stories and TikTok, with the top and bottom kept clear for your name and the buttons.
The Tape Room
Athletes watch tape. So the clubhouse has a tape room now. Tap KEEP on a highlight and it goes on that course's shelf, ten tapes a course. When a shelf is full, it asks which one to tape over. Your number-one round keeps itself.
Every tape gets a sleeve, drawn at random from twelve old-store VHS boxes, so no two shelves look the same. The label says who kept it.
It's a room, not a page. A TV and VCR on a stand, a bookcase, a rug, a corkboard. And on the floor, the console from the start screen, cartridge in, controllers plugged in.
Where your tapes live: with a confirmed bag tag, they're saved on our server and follow you to a new phone. Without one, they stay on the phone you kept them on. The room tells you which.
Race the Ghosts
Every real round records itself now. When a round goes up on a board, its ghost goes up with it. Tap a name and RACE THEIR GHOST: same course, same length, same sky, the same wind on every hole. Their throws fly beside yours as light. Beat them and they stand behind you at the celebration, blue and see-through, clapping. Think Return of the Jedi.
Faces That Keep Score
The reference was the continue screen in Street Fighter II. Your chaser's portrait reacts to your round now. Three over, they're sweating. Six over, the signature thing goes: Roxie's hawk flops, Kenji's band slips over an eye, Otto's brim comes down. Ten over, a plaster and a black eye. On a hot card they grin, and a star twinkles. They blink, too. Dusk barely.
The Conversations
Games where the other characters say the same five things teach you to stop listening. I want the talk in a championship to be worth paying attention to every time. So I rewrote it, about 2,500 new lines.
It remembers what you've heard, across rounds, and always reaches for something you haven't.
Every rival has a back-and-forth with every chaser, at the turn and at the end. Mabel talks to Otto differently than she talks to Roxie.
They watch the hole. Every hole on the three home courses has its own lines, and a big moment gets answered on the next board.
They remember you. Beat someone twice and the rematch sounds like it.
Your chaser answers back.
And
The app opens faster. From the home screen it used to sit on a still blue disc for about five seconds. The logo pulses right away now, and the game draws its first frame in a tenth of a second instead of three.
Patrons get thanked by name, in the credits and at the end of every round, by their Patreon username.
The title has its socials along the bottom: Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, YouTube, TikTok and Threads.
Clubhouse cards have one way out: BACK. There used to be two.
What Went Wrong (All Fixed)
My first shared clip put INSTANT REPLAY under my own profile picture on Stories. Everything sits inside the safe zones now, and the logo is centered.
The first replays were wrong in small ways. No sound when the disc hit a tree, no spin-out after it, and a drive could start scrolled up from the tee before the camera found the disc. And no celebration at all. All of that plays now.
I played a whole North Woods championship and got no replays at the end. An update had gone live mid-round, and the page went looking for files that weren't there anymore. The game loads them ahead of time now.
Instagram cut my 10-second clip to 5. The video file didn't say how long it was. It does now.
An error popped up mid-round, and I couldn't read it. The game now records where every error came from, and only shows you its own.
I ran two bug hunts on the new stuff, covering replays, the recorder, the ghost race and multiplayer. The first one alone turned up 25 fixes. A couple you might have hit:
SKIP on a replay did nothing. A note in the code had swallowed it.
Keeping two tapes at once could lose one.
Things I tried and threw out: the first tape sleeves, which were proof-of-concept and blocky. A TV that looked like it was floating in the room. And three versions of the faces, including a full redraw. The original faces were better, so they stayed, and the work went into how they change.
Scores: no course changed, so the fairness bot's numbers didn't move.
Your Turn
Finish a round and watch your highlights. Keep the best one and go find it in the tape room. Then tap a name on a board and race their ghost. Crooked Hollow is open until October 31.
— Alex, Assistant Greenskeeper