Interesting take on the theme, with decent gameplay. However, I didn't like how the mouse movement was so imprecise and kept going after I had stopped. Made it hard to aim.

My top score is 2, but I think that I some shots I took should also be holes.

Making a game with physics requires a lot of polish, so here are my suggestions for making it better:
* I'm not sure why you didn't add forwards and backwards movement to camera. To move forwards I had to rotate 90 degrees and move sideways
* Using normals on ball movement direction, like in pool, is nice, but without ability to adjust strike force it's really hard to move the ball in direction you want, especially on bumpy ground
* As I wrote earlier, some balls came very close to hole without giving me point. As a player I will appreciate more if hole collider was a bit bigger than the hole itself. Better to give score when you shouldn't than not give it when you should :)
* For some precission shots, it would be nice if you added some acceleration to camera movement. Just tapping left/right would move it only slightly making it easier to control shooting direction

I'm sure you are aware of most of those, but 48 hours is flies by quickly and tweaking all values takes a lot of time. Nice game overall. I liked main menu design. Cheers!

Thank you for the feedback. Not had time to play any games yet, back at work :/

@ryzy27 So, I kept with the rotation rather than full movement, which is prob not what people expect. Sort of made sense in my head at the time. Originally you were in a ship that circled the level itself - ie you didnt control it at all, and I obv changed that. Full movement would be better now, agreed.

The force applied to the balls depends on distance from contact point (ExplosionForce), ie zapping a point not too close to a ball gives finer control. That was the idea, anyway... zapping a ball directly will fire it into space :) Game instructions/tutorial would help explain this.

Hole collider: yes, bit of a hack since there isn't a real 'hole' in the terrain. If the collider is bigger it looks odd when 'falling' into the hole :(

Yes (@wsKilljoy) I expect mouse movement depends a bit on other factors, like the players mouse settings, which take a lot of testing and tweaking + sensitivity options. ie it seems ok here, but not enough testing on other PCs.

A shooter-golf game is definitely a creative approach to the theme and congrats on your first Ludum Dare entry (?). I see that other commentators have pointed out some issues like it is quite difficult to foresee how the balls will behave but, those 48 fly quickly. Nice game!

Congratulations for make it like a Compo.

When i shoot the ball it almost always strike the ball out of the area, there should be less force added to the balls in my opinion. Maybe try to change the movement of the camera somehow, like up and down move was missing for me.

Great game for compo, it looks very well :) The movement around the playing area could be a bit faster :)

Cool idea, and good execution. I had trouble with perspective sometimes - it was hard to tell where the balls were with no shadows and with the size looking the same regardless of distance. The physics was OK - a little hard to figure out, but your hint helped. Visually very cool. Sound was limited. The camera was weird - I seemed to gain and lose distance from the center without doing anything. I could reset, but it was hard to intuit. Cool game, though - I had fun with it.

I love the concept! It was really challenging but I managed to get an amazing score of 2 :D
Having more control over the camera would have been nice and maybe a slightly weaker laser would have helped. I basically had to aim at the balls from the top to control them and sometimes they glitched through the world. Making the hole a bit more forgiving would also be cool.
Overall still a solid Compo entry!

On my first play the hole was on the side of a mountain :D
Cute game, even though it seems impossible to actually control which direction balls are going :)

Thanks for all the new plays + comments. Yeeees, you all spot the stuff that should be tweaked ;)

Physics + 3d save some time early on, but add work later (that bloody camera, urgh).

@dob I always intend to 'prioritise' sound, and always fail, lol. I had about a day and a half to work on it. Yes, I think people assume you zap the balls directly, but its more a blast radius. Needed a tutorial. UPDATE: video added 👍

I'm getting down to playing some entries now. This theme turned out well.

I saw your explanation for not letting the player move forward/backwards, but why can't they look directly downwards? also it is a bit weird on the bottom because the camera kind of gets stuck in a position if you keep looking down once you have hit the limit.

Cool idea and solid concept. Need some polish, obviously. Would be nice to have multiplayer mode where you have to zap ball into opposite holes, or same hole, but the last player, who touched the ball, get the score. Just an idea...

Nice! I got to 12 score and up to 5 minutes, and then stopped when I realized that could go on forever. :smile: Maybe some sort of escalating challenge (faster timer, less time back on the clock for each successive hole-in, etc.) would be good. Also, the camera controls stressed me out a little.

I like the environment a lot. It's simple but really does feel alien. :smiley:

We made a game with a very similar concept/controls -- [Golf with Guns](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/untitled-fpsg)

Cheers @Issac. Am downloading your entry now.
*Yes*, once you master the physics you can go forever... on that hole anyway, would need more courses.

Nice concept, the hit felt a little too floaty for my teste

Neat idea. What I didn't like was the ball physics really, seemed very unpredictable to me (except that most balls flew right into space when I shot them, even if far away). Also didn't like the camera controls and not being able to zoom in.

Got to 15 points with 5 minutes in the bank. Quite fun actually, maybe it would have been nice to have the hole be not quite as near to the border, so there's a little more room for movement without the danger of losing the ball alltogether. Shooting the balls into space was also quite fun.

As pointed out by others, the camera movement could need some more work. Regarding the hole collider being too small: Why not just apply a little "gravitational" force towards the hole once the balls are within a certain distance? Haven't really used Unity, but I'd be surprised if something like that wasn't possible to implement relatively quickly.

Good work though, fun original little game, basically all I'm asking for when playtesting LD games.

This was a really cool idea! I think with more structured levels it could be a great game, but as is its a neat jam game which was great fun to play around with. Love how floaty the whole physics were and that you were able to shoot the balls into oblivion.

Lazers and golf - who knew? Fun game! That was really cool!

@ShellfishGames - yeah, a small force around the hole would indeed work :/

@randomphanton, @BlazeMcDeezy thank u for your comments, appreciated. Indeed, its just a think to play around with. I did try to make it less floaty, but got so used to the original physics I just kept them...
Originally it was much stricter, Game Over for losing a ball, then I realised thats no fun 😏

Will check out + rate your games.

The camera movement is really hard. I was struggling to make my camera be where I wanted it to be. Also, I did not manage to hit any balls in. The forces seemed to kinda too strong. Either the ball flew away, or he simply stays in one place. The idea is great tho, It was fun shooting these balls :D

I played it for a while not realizing I shouldn't shoot the balls directly. After watching your video I came back to it and got a score of 6. I've had the idea for a fps soccer game for a while and I was really happy to see something similar to that. I think it may have been more successful with normaler fps controls since these controls made the movement kind of hard. I would love to see something like this more polished out and with a level system.

I found it pretty easy to control the force applied to the ball, but difficult to move the camera around. On my first attempt had to decide to stop playing because I kept increasing time, if you add more holes maybe limit the number of balls players get per hole, or have a set goal and a timer they are trying to beat..

Regardless this was very fun, one of my favorites from this jam, and believe it or not I don't actually like golf games or shooter games..

I'm fascinated by idea! How did you get to this? If only you had team or more time. Totally playable.
Camera movement was annoying, missing more audio, better map, maybe if balls were a little bit faster... But core mechanics totally got me! My favourite theme completion.

@lost-dutchman-software & @cornel - thank u so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it 😊

I suppose I have a fascination with physics games, I tend to go in that direction, though it creates some work with playability and camera. I made a 2d game years ago where you zap a pool table, and a 7DFPS game which was kinda 3d pool with a gun... Next time I should go for something totally outside my 'normal' preferences!

However, I'd not used the Unity terrain tool before. The course is, admittedly, the first thing I bodged together 🙄

Another favourite of mine from this jam is https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ping-bang-pong -- love it!

@bazld Its good to get out of your comfort zone and learn new things but making a game you like and sharing it is what makes game dev so fun. I really dig this game, I'll have to check out your pool game.

Do you think it would be OK if I reach out to you in the future with some unity questions? I'm in the middle of making a weird physics based bowling game and would love if you could point me in the direction of how you added force to the ball in this game (how it hits harder if you shoot the laser closer to the ball).

@lost-dutchman-software Sure (barryrs @ g mail . com).
Like most people, I spend half my time googling the answers. 😎
Theres a built in function 'AddExplosionForce' which did what I wanted:

```
// shoot
if (Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0))
{ // Find the point we zapped
RaycastHit hit;
if (Physics.Raycast(transform.position, transform.forward, out hit))
{
DoForces(hit.point, hit.transform);
}
...

void DoForces(Vector3 hitpt, Transform transf )
{
// Find everything within a sphere of the pt we zapped
Collider[] colliders = Physics.OverlapSphere(hitpt, 100);

// For all balls within the sphere, apply a force.
foreach (var hit in colliders)
{
if (!hit)
continue;

if (hit.transform.tag == "Ball")
{ // This automatically scales the force depending on distnance from hit pt!
hit.GetComponent<Rigidbody>().AddExplosionForce(40, hitpt, 75, 0.0f, ForceMode.VelocityChange);
}

}
}


```

http://goodreactions.com/poolzap/ (made when I was doing OneGameAMonth).

This was cool, I had fun playing around with it. My initial reaction was shock that they aim moves so slow and soupy, but I soon came to realize that this is critical for making you feel like your shots have to count -- no quick spamming of minor corrections!

My first game was spent getting a handle on things and I only got a 2. I knew I could do better though, so I buckled down a bit and got myself an 8. I can see from the comments above though that this does not make me the A-Hole Master after all! Oh well.

Cool idea, and you made some interesting choices that gave it a unique feel. Nice work!

@bazld Thank you, Also your pool game is fun, I found myself keeping track of how many shots it took to sink all the balls and trying to beat my own record, gotta stop playing that so I can play more LD41 games. Seriously thanks again your really cool!

Nice work with the game. My gut reaction is to ask for crazier stages. I used to play Albatross18 a lot and it had such an advantage over standard golf games by having fantasy courses and worlds like playing on battleships. If you could expand this and take advantage of truly alien worlds you can really push this far!