‘Cloudlands: VR Minigolf’ Level Editor Makes Building New Courses As Easy as Legos

By
Ben Lang
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13

Cloudlands: VR Minigolf’s new level editor makes creating and sharing new courses a snap.

Level editors in videogames can greatly expand available content thanks to community-made creations, but actually learning how to use them can involve a steep learning curve, often leaving only a small number of dedicated creators to the task of making new content. Thanks to the intuitive nature of VR motion controls, that’s all about to change.

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See Also: VR Minigolf is Here and Real Minigolf Should be Scared

Cloudlands: VR Minigolf has launched a level editor in their latest update, allowing users to pick, place, and snap together course segments with incredible ease. Even more advanced components, like the game’s frequent cannons (which shoot your ball to a predefined location) can be placed and aimed as easily as a toy. You can add scenery just as easily by dragging and dropping props into position.

The trailer above shows the level editor in action and some of the inventive courses players have already created.

Once your level is built, the game allows you to share courses with the community directly through Steam and there’s already more than 200 player-made courses. Players can rate and favorite courses, allowing the best to float to the top.

The latest update also upgrades the game to Unity 5.4, which developer Futuretown says increases performance on some systems. Later updates are planned to expand the level editor further with more pieces.

Cloudlands: VR Minigolf, which currently run $20, is well rated on Steam (80% positive) and I also found it quite enjoyable in my hands-on preview earlier this year.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • interesting, hope this comes to PSVR in the future.

  • DiGiCT Ltd

    Adding this feature makes this game complete and done as a full finished game.
    Its a good thing people can build their own courses, it takes away the need for devs to deliver new maps and only need to focus on performance tweaks and minor bug fixes.
    $20 for a game is not much. as there are not many VR users yet compared to the old fashion gamers.
    Hopefully it will change soon for devs as cost to make VR games are higher as a old fashion game on a similar quality.

    Good job guys, your game look well polished !

    • Charles

      But when will they add the option to disable the “feature” of the course edges turning semi-transparent when you get anywhere near them? That’s immersion-breaking to me and one of the main reasons I don’t feel like buying the full version.

      • dogtato

        Never, I’m guessing. Everything turns transparent when you clip through it, it’s kind of a fundamental design decision. Do you want the club collide with walls and obstacles? Getting stuck next to a wall is a shitty part of real minigolf that this game solves.

        • Charles

          Well it’s not just when you put your face through it – it’s at seemingly-random times, when you’re within like 5 feet of it. Personally I think it would be fine if the club just went straight through it without it turning transparent, or if it only turned transparent when in close proximity to the club or the user’s face. Either way, options would be great.

          • dogtato

            Hm, I may not have observed what you’re talking about. I’ve only noticed it when headset or club is actually clipping through something.

          • Charles

            Maybe they fixed it but not in the demo? If so, that’s bad marketing to not keep the demo up-to-date. Do you have the full game?

          • J.C.

            It still does this in the game. It does it whenever it believes your view of the ball or swing is obstructed. It’s not always correct, and it will sometimes make a large part of the course edging transparent since it affects entire pieces, not individual polygons. It errs on the side of visibility, not believability.
            I’m not going to pretend I forget it’s happening. I don’t. But in multiplayer, which is primarily where I play Cloudlands, I’m more concerned with getting a higher score than anything else.

            You could post your complaint on their forum, the devs are really responsive and they may add in an “adaptive transparency” toggle, or at least a command line argument. It doesn’t SEEM like something that’d be difficult to code, although it may not get into the actual game menus.

          • Charles

            Good idea – maybe I will.

      • Justin

        Hi Charles, thanks for the feedback. I’m one of the developers on Cloudlands. Honestly, swinging and putting your club into opaque geometry is much more immersion breaking than having it fade out. If it fades out, at least you can see your own putter, but if your ball is against a wall and you’re putting and your putter is completely “submerged” inside the wall rock geometry and you can’t even see it, it’s a bit annoying and much less believable. If the wall “ghosts” you can buy into this logic, but if the club simply goes inside the wall geometry and you can’t see the ball while you’re putting it feels like a bug/unpolished. Putting the option to toggle this functionality into the pause menu would be easy though. I’ll discuss with the rest of the dev team and see how we’re tracking. There’s still a lot we’re adding to the editor.

        Also, regarding larger portions of the track going transparent is simply done for optimization. If every piece of the world is cut up into smaller geo, then we could have smaller pieces go transparent but at the cost of performance. It was a performance trade off we decided to go with to get the game running on lower spec machines.

        • Charles

          Hi, thanks for the thorough reply – wasn’t expecting that. Well I just tried the game again and it’s not as bad as I remembered it being – walls don’t disappear at random times, but just when the club is near them. But I still think it’s annoying the way it is – it would be better if the wall would only disappear when the club is completely up against it or inside of it, and if the wall disappeared completely instead of turning into what looks like glass (which the club somehow goes through). Or if these two parameters were adjustable, that would probably be best. Or able to be turned off, since in real life mini golf you have to work with where the wall is. Options would be good. Thanks for looking into it – hope you can make it better with this feedback.

  • ZenInsight

    Wow. That’s brilliant! Looks super fun as well.

  • Alexisms

    It’s Lego, not Legos. I know i shouldn’t be so pedantic :-)