Twilight golf is the unassuming name of a soon to be released physics/adventure game. Developed by Howling Moon software, I was lucky enough to get the chance to test out the game almost a month ago. This is a truly unique and stunning game. There is a back-story on the website, but simply, your job is to navigate the twilight temple which involves increasingly more challenging (and sometimes random) environments to light up all of the golden orbs and ultimately save the world from darkness. You do this by manipulating a small ball on the screen, touching it and dragging to control the speed and direction of the ball, which moves when you release your finger. If this is golf, then I need to give the original game another try, and like the original the physics in this game are full and sometimes intensely frustrating. There are a huge variety of obstacles and puzzles to overcome to complete the levels, and each time you make an adjustment to the movement of your ball (called a stroke) it affects your score. The highest score comes from the least number of movements of the ball to navigate the level. There are also a huge number of objects that you can interact with along that way including seesaws, drawbridges, swinging chains, gravity orbs, sticky orbs, levers, flip flops, elevators etc. My favourite thing was using normal objects like other balls to complete machines (like fitting a smaller cog between two larger ones), or pushing around blocks to manipulate the movement of the elevators. There are a lot of physics based games around but without a doubt, this is my favourite solely for the variety of levels and the difficulty of not only getting to the objective, but doing it without using a lot of strokes. The sound in the game is really relaxing, and the graphics of the environments, objects and the ball is second to none. There are shadows cast, particle effects this is one seriously good looking game. This game also has a lot of levels and will keep you busy trying to beat your scores. Check out the screen shots and video, the game will be released (along with a lite) on the 21st of October. This is the game play video
Thanks a lot for the review, arhb! We're glad you like Twilight Golf! Also, as a heads up, we're planning some cool giveaways _before_ the actual release of the game. So everyone keep their eyes open for that!
A couple of years ago we threw together a game prototype called Gulf. The idea for it was to create a 2D mini-golf like game with physics puzzles. We figured the best way to do that and make it unique was to turn mini-golf on it's side so that you had some gravity in the mix. Graphically Twilight Golf diverged significantly from looking like mini-golf, but the basic gameplay is still there with trying to get past the obstacles to the goal in the fewest strokes. Gameplay wise, it likes somewhere between Melon Golf and Ragdoll Cannon. (both excellent games if you haven't tried them) I guess we went with the dark theme for the game because I badly wanted an excuse to use the lighting algorithm I came up with for doing the hardware accelerated shadow casting. We have a bit more about the history on our blog.
I agree with all of that. It's an AMAZING game, just like Crayon Ball. Not to mention the icon is awesome. All it needs is more levels.
Just started working on the first update yesterday. I added higher quality shadows for OpenGL 2.0 compatible devices (3GS and the new iPod Touches) among a number of other smaller features. In addition, we are also hoping to get a few more levels made in the next few days. A beta tester suggested fun possibility for an extra unlockable game mode. Hopefully we can get the scoring worked out for that quickly too.
was that the one I suggested anyways don't even think of plus+ and go with openfient or zincous might ban you
For some reason the fire effects look really out of place. Did you ever change them to look nicer to fit with the rest of the game?
I only mentioned it as a side note too... Hmmm... Maybe both of our side notes makes one real comment?
We'd have to look back through the all the feedback emails, but somebody suggested it and we thought it was a good idea. Now we just have to figure out how to fit the scoring code for it into the UI.
Just in case people haven't seen, we are also running a promo code giveaway to win a pre-release copy of Twilight Golf tomorrow. We are giving away 20 copies, more info in the giveaway thread.
