The Golf Club Interview with Pete Garcin Reveals Even More Details About the Game

SBX: Tell us a bit about the online/social components of the game. How will courses be shared, and how will online competitive multiplayer work for two or more people?

PG: Sharing is designed to be as seamless and simple as possible. Once you’ve created a course, you can hit the ‘Publish’ button and your course will be posted to the server and available for others to play. And to make sharing a large number of courses feasible, we only upload the “DNA” of the course, so the amount of data that it transfers is extremely small –- downloading and browsing new courses online is essentially invisible compared to local courses.

In terms of competition we’ve moved to an asynchronous model of gameplay, so you’re almost always competing against your friends and rivals. No matter whether your friends are online or not, you can always choose to play against their best balls in the form of “ghost balls.” If they are online, you can invite them to join a round and play together in real time, but there’s no waiting; if you don’t want to sit in a lobby waiting for your friend to join, you can send them the request, start your round, and then eventually your friend will catch up. And if they do join mid-round, because our course is all one big world, you can turn around and see them teeing off in the distance. It’s really super cool when that happens.