Brendan Keogh's Putting Challenge

NOTE: This is the original 2018 Pico-8 version and does NOT include the updated 2022 version available on Steam here.

Brendan Keogh's Putting Challenge is a Pico-8 golf game about the parts of golf that other videogames cut out. Put the ball on the tee yourself. After hitting the ball, manually walk to where the ball went before you hit it again. If the ball goes in the water, put down another ball! Remove your ball from the hole before moving on to the next hole. If you run out of balls, return to the Pro Shop to get more balls. This is a golf game with unprecedented interactivity!!

Sounds tedious? It sort of is! But's it's also kind of relaxing, and it draws attention to just how edited and montaged most golf games are in their focus on the 'interesting bits'.  Here, the 9-hole course is a single, unified experience.

I've crafted one big world, ten screens by ten screens. Within that world is a golf course of 9 holes. You are free to explore and walk around the course, and can complete holes in any order you want.

I developed this game in Pico-8. It was a whole lot of work to get a game of this scale and complexity to fit in a Pico-8 cart, and I'm really proud of the quality of this final product.

Wait, why does this game cost $1??

This is the first time I've set a minimum price for one of my games. All my other games are small, quick, slapdash things. While this game is still quite small, I also put a considerable amount of work into it over the last few weeks, and I think it's important to not contribute to the devaluation of videogame labour. So I think it's worth paying a single dollar for. That's less than you'd pay for a single round of Time Crisis 2! 

You also get any additional courses I release in the future for free. I've already released a second 9-hole course!

So what do I get? 

$1 unlocks a zip file within which you will find two versions of the game: a Pico-8 cart that you can run in Pico-8, if you own a copy of Pico-8; and a HTML5 version of the game you can run in any browser if you don't own Pico-8. (Note: Chrome has issues with audio since an update earlier this year. There's workarounds in the readme file. Or just use a different browser.)

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!!

Multiple people on Twitter joked that they would pay for golf buggy dlc. WELL GUESS WHAT SUCKERS:

That's right, if you pay $2 for CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION, you get an exclusive day one dlc golf buggy! Zip around the golf course up to 4x faster!! Wow!