Walkabout Mini Golf from Mighty Coconut launched its newest paid add-on course inspired by Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
Players begin on a small submersible traveling to dock at the top of Captain Nemo’s famed submarine, The Nautilus. You’ll play through 18 holes packed into the Nautilus’ decks moving downward to an encounter with the story’s memorable sea monster, a giant squid. Developers added seating locations throughout the ship so players can pause for a chat amid the “opulent” surroundings, which take inspiration from previous interpretations of the story.
The course also includes a new game mechanic — steam — which pushes your ball around the holes in new ways.
“We’ve heard a lot of multi-players like to play a game and then they spend just another hour or so just visiting with friends,” Senior Art Director Don Carson told UploadVR. “So we’ve also worked in comfortable seating and places that seem like an obvious place to hang out.”
Carson gave UploadVR a tour of the steampunk course in the video below and shared behind-the-scenes details of the developing process at Mighty Coconut.
Carson was an imagineer at Disney in the ’80s and ’90s and worked on attractions such as Splash Mountain in Disneyworld and Toon Town in Disneyland, he told us. While 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea started as a “multi-layered illustration”, Carson says much of the work on the studio’s upcoming courses starts in VR with a “shared collaborative model” using Gravity Sketch.
20,000 Leagues is the first of three of Verne’s 19th century works to get the mini golf theme park treatment from Mighty Coconut. Verne’s long-in-the-public-domain works have been adapted countless times in the years since their publication, with Carson teasing that they were high on a list of “at least 100 ideas” in consideration for development by the studio when he joined up about a year ago. The course will eventually be joined by Around The World In 80 Days & Journey To The Center Of The Earth.
“They really are wish fulfillment,” he said. “ There’s an 8-year-old version of myself — that kid that would go to the backyard with a shovel and know by lunchtime you would have dug to China — and this idea that we get design that journey from that book where we descend into the Earth and then go through those iconic environments one after the other…is pinch-worthy.”
Carson said he joined Mighty Coconut after sending in a fan letter to the developers, impressed by the similarity of their courses to theme park design. He said he’s got a short list in his head of courses he wants to build and about half of them are currently under construction.
Mighty Coconut also recently announced a Myst course that’s coming soon, recently launched a course inspired by the 1980’s movie Labyrinth, and Carson confirmed again that a phone-based version of the game is still in the works to offer cross-play across more devices.
You can find the 20,000 Leagues paid DLC course for Walkabout Mini Golf on stores for Quest and Steam.
