Developing Links 2003's Real Time Swing

Editor's Note: This piece was written by a member of the Links 2003 Dev Team before the game shipped in the fall of 2002.

The fun has begun!  We are in the final stages before finishing the game and sending it off to manufacturing. The bug counts are slowly going down and our hours at work are going up and up, although I didn't realize they could get any longer. On top of all the fun that goes into wrapping up the development cycle on a video game, we have a press tour next week, some final play testing next week in Redmond, a thing called Golfstock the following week. People are sick of eating pizza and burgers for dinner and, on top of that, I'm trying to find some spare time to mow my lawn.

Real Time Swing is one of the main reasons we went to a polygonal golfer (polygolfer) instead of a video golfer in Links 2003.

We were very concerned about Real Time Swing because it's one of those features you have to get absolutely perfect or it's no fun and people will end up hating it.  We weren't sure if we were going to take it to E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Exposition) or not. In one sense we wanted to unveil this really cool new way of playing Links, and in another sense, we weren't sure it was ready for public consumption.

We decided about a month prior to E3 that it wasn't ready for the public, but gave ourselves two weeks to get it to the point where we'd be willing to let people play it on their own.

Ready for the World?

By the time the drop dead-date came, most people had forgotten that there was even a drop dead-date, so Real Time Swing is in for E3, and it's a good thing because press releases are going out touting it as one of our new big features for this year. Fortunately we had some breakthroughs with the feature shortly after deciding on the drop dead-date.

Originally, we thought the implementation of  Real Time Swing would be so difficult that it would require weeks of tuning. Luckily, that turned out to not be true. The developer assigned to Real Time Swing locked himself in his office for several days and came out with a Real Time Swing that was surprisingly polished and fun to play right away.

We all knew when we played it that day that it would be ready for E3. All we needed was a couple more weeks of fine tuning.

For the next several weeks we continued to play test Real Time Swing internally and made minor adjustments heading into E3. We worked closely with the Usability Testing Team in Redmond. We did a lot of blending between moves and tuning the mouse sensitivity in those final weeks.

However, if left alone with Real Time Swing for any length of time, some of the bugs would become fairly obvious. These bugs made playing a shot with anything short of a full swing very difficult and somewhat frustrating. For example, if you had your Sand Wedge out and wanted to hit the ball less than a full swing, say about 90 yards rather than the full-swing length of 105 yards, it was nearly impossible. The difficulty of getting the back swing and golf head speed to hit a 90-yard shot instead of 105 yards wasn't easy. This was true with all clubs, but was most noticeable when using short irons and the putter.

Testing, Testing ...

Since E3 we've conducted numerous tests on this feature of the game and experimented with several ways to improve this part of the feature, ranging from a new User Interface, to more descriptive lessons, to flat out telling the user how to hit their shot. We didn't use all of them, though.  At this point we've got a great solution that everyone agrees makes the Real Time Swing more usable for less than full power swings. It's tested very well in the most recent usability tests and will go up for final testing in Redmond soon.

The other bug we had, but that we thought nobody would notice at E3, was there wasn't any IK (Inverse Kinematics) on the feet. During the swing the golfer's feet would move around like he was standing in two inches of mud. Unless you were really concentrating on watching the golfer's feet during the motion, most people wouldn't notice it. So we took it to E3 with that bug. Since then, it's been fixed and looks really great!

E3 was a big success for Real Time Swing. Nearly everyone who played it commented that it was much more fun than the classic 3-click swing. Many hard core Linksters who tried it at E3 and then the 3-click swing, came back to Real Time Swing within a few minutes. We received such great feedback on it at E3 and in play tests that we decided to make it the new default swing for Links 2003.

Now, here we are in the final stretch run before going to manufacturing and we're still tweaking Real Time Swing, but in smaller increments than we were around E3.  We expected this and we've made some great improvements to it since E3 and continue to make improvements on a weekly basis.  The new lessons really help with learning and becoming proficient with Real Time Swing.

It's simply better

Next week, we'll conduct our final play tests on the feature and will make adjustments based on that. After the play tests, we'll hold off on making any more changes unless absolutely necessary.

We feel really good about the Real Time Swing and I'm confident that if users give it a try, they'll use it all the time.  The motion of the mouse is so much more like a real golf swing than simply clicking two or three times it's unbelievable.  On top of that, seeing the golfer moving based on your mouse's motions is very compelling.

We've had some heroic efforts by our development team and continue to do so to get these features up to the Links bar of excellence and I'm confident the new features are up to and even exceed the standards set by previous Links versions.  We're sure players will enjoy Real Time Swing when Links 2003 comes out this fall.

Check out the Real Time Swing article the Links Insider's Tips and Strategy area.