Golf Peaks
this game, again, was in the racial justice bundle so i paid no money for it. not with the intent to buy this game anyway.
Golf Peaks is a movement puzzle. It sneakily uses the word "cards" in its description to make you think it's a card game and ride the hype there, but it's not. The cards only exist as a UI element. The core gameplay loop is that you have a ball and you need to get to the hole, and you have a limited amount of moves which are detailed in cards, and you can initiate movement with one of those cards in any direction. Different block types and movement styles add complexity. Blah blah. Very simple game.
I'm not talking about this game because of the actual game itself. It's a very simple, albeit finely polished and I suppose satisfying game. But this game more than any other exemplifies for me a shift in the culture & expectations of game development. Sometimes while playing an indie game I'll have the thought "huh, this feels like the kind of game I would have played on Kongregate or Armor Games or Miniclip or what have you ~15 years ago." but in most cases i find something that at least somewhat distinguishes this fine wheat from the flash game ocean's chaff.
Not Golf Peaks though. Golf Peaks is 100% unquestionably just a 2005 era flash game. The simple, cube-based copy-and-paste visuals that get a recolor every 10 levels or so. The ambient quick-loop music. Even the way levels are separated into worlds and how you navigate through them. It's seriously uncanny. It feels like I stepped back in time, and now I'm 11 again. I'm playing the latest game to rise to the top of the hot list in the puzzle category while I wait for a lobby to fill in Platform Racing 2.
The only way I would be able to tell this game was released in 2018 and not 2005 is the price tag and the platforms. This game costs $5 on PC (steam, itch.io), Nintendo Switch, & Mobile. This isn't to say that I think that's an unreasonable price tag. The early internet, in general, had a bit more difficulty with the idea that creators should be compensated for their work (this is still a problem in some areas). But the shift between these two eras is fascinating to me.
Back in my day
, these sorts of games generally were generally labors of love. A really good developer might get a publishing deal with one of the big flash sites like Armor or Kongregate in order to drive traffic to their site, but that was rare. And like youtube, you MIGHT get some cut of the ad revenue, but only if you reached a minimum payout threshold which few games did. And even then, the totals were low.
But that was fine because I don't think money was the point back then? Most of these were one-person projects, start to finish. Occasionally you'd get a separate artist, but oftentimes devs would just make do with what they could manage, or just use free assets. There's a reason I called out the copy-paste art style of Golf Peaks; that was a practical decision most devs of that era made so they could focus on the actual part of the game development they wanted to focus on. The games mostly weren't intended to be big dramatic knock-out hits. They were learning experiences for fledgling creators, many of whom would go on to find success in the industry. And we tended to judge them on that standard. That was the symbiotic relationship: devs upload their learning project games for free, and players give them attention and feedback. Obviously not a sustainable model for people wanting to make a living! But again, that wasn't the point. Money was, if anything, secondary to the value of having made a game and having actual people play it and enjoy it.
That's my core issue with Golf Peaks. It feels like a game someone made in order to learn how to create games, and then they polished it up a little afterwards. And that's fine. In fact, I think that's fantastic. But they went on to enter it into (and apparently win) some indie game contests, and now they're selling it for $5 and I'm left wondering if I'm out of touch. I know we should be compensating people for their creative labor, but in this case I'm just left scratching my head trying to figure out what I should be paying for a work that feels like a stepping stone to better things.
Golf Peaks is like, fine. I don't think it's worth $5. Certainly not in 2005, and probably not in 2020 either. But I suppose nowadays you're a fool if you give anything away for free.