Spooky Season is Here. Crooked Hollow is Alive! 🧟
Spooky season, baby. We have arrived.
Crooked Hollow is up now. Eighteen holes, and it plays like the other three — fast three, quick nine, full eighteen, championship, skins. All of it's there.
I've been kicking the seasonal course idea around for a while. Partly it's a reason to come back and find something new. But it's also the first place I've let myself get properly weird with this game.
Why seasonal courses exist at all. The three mainline courses have a rule I don't break: don't break the world. No zombies on Low Five Classic. Seasonal courses are where I get to push into the fantastical — ghosts, scarecrows, a zombie crossing — without the main game stopping making sense.
The Messenger, and jokes nobody's in on. A big part of the tone I'm after. Silly premise, characters playing it completely straight. I talk about where that comes from.
The castle. Every course has something on the horizon — the fire tower on North Woods, the volcano on Castaway Cays. Crooked Hollow has a castle, and you spend the round walking toward it. You start in a village and finish at the battlements.
Doglegs, and what they cost me. I expanded the plane for this one so I could finally build real turns. It's the first time you'll throw hard left or hard right in this game. The tradeoff is you now have to pan the camera to set up your pullback, and that pullback took me a long time to get feeling right on a vertical screen. I'm still chewing on it.
Day one was too hard. I shipped on the 1st, played it myself, and found holes that weren't challenging so much as not fun — too many trees sitting in the landing zones. I went back in and thinned it out. You can par this course now. You could not par the first version.
A fix that improved every course. Chasing Crooked Hollow's difficulty led me into the NPC scoring, which was generating scores off each character's skill and completely ignoring how hard the course actually is. That's why the Professor could post a -17 while you were grinding out a +30. It accounts for difficulty now, so championships should feel fairer everywhere, not just here.
"The freaks come out at night." There's a Bonnaroo story behind that one.
What's coming. November is probably mainline courses rather than another seasonal. December I'm thinking snow.
One thing just for you all
The dev button that was sitting on the title screen is hidden now. But if you tap the top right corner of the title screen, it still opens. Jump to any hole, drop straight into the minigames, unlock everybody. Go poke at it.
Crooked Hollow comes down in November, so get your rounds in while it's up.
And seriously — fast three, quick nine, full eighteen. Try me.