0.4 release is going to be a large overhaul

Hello everyone. First of off thanks so much for the warm welcome to itch. I got a few downloads of my alpha game and I hope it's not too buggy at the moment. Also appreciate the donations from people who paid. It gives me hope.

Wanted to put something up here because v0.4 will probably end up being the next release and I'm trying to work in a pretty thorough overhaul of the current system. If nothing else, this will be the stroke-play edition and I'll have CPU characters, but I'm really trying for a lot more than that.

Ideally, this will refine and optimize the current system and then I can apply it retroactively to the parts of the game that are already finished to make everything run more smoothly and take some of the spaghetti out of the code base. I'm mostly going to be looking at my node setup and how to optimize it so that that character and ball nodes can operate completely independently of whatever scene they are are in. I think this will add a lot to the game on it's own, allowing me to build in all kinds of other fun mechanics.

I'll also be taking a brief look at the current UI and contemplating ways to make it better and more consistent. 

Lastly, I want to at least take a stab at upping the game on the ball physics perspective. At the very least, there is a bug currently where the ball will sometimes roll slow for a long time and then never report when it stops moving. This is a game-breaking feature and really needs to be addressed. Also, if I make the physics engine from scratch it should be easier to add things like wind and also perhaps make missed shots a little more realistic, as well as adding some english to curve the ball this way or that predictably.

I've been practicing about 200 shots a day in real like since a few weeks after I started this project and have learned volumes about golf so that while I'm going to keep the controls of the game simple, hopefully I can make the visible mechanics of ballflight more realistic or at the very least more playable.

That said, I'm going to have to take a day job soon as my regular dev work has slowed to the point where it isn't sustainable currently, so that will eat into my programming time as well. Just know that I am definitely still grinding on this project but the next update will be pretty large and I want to make sure that it is done right.

I'll try to keep you guys posted on my project, both here and on r/binkgolf on reddit.