So, about this “hattie goes golfing” thing. It wasn’t some grand plan, you know? I was just fiddling around, needed something to do with my hands, my brain. Things had been a bit… much, let’s say. And I figured, why not try to make a little game? Sounded easy enough. Famous last words, right?
Getting Started on Hattie
I didn’t have any fancy tools or anything. Just grabbed some free software I’d heard folks talk about. Thought I’d whip up a simple golf game. Golf seems straightforward – hit ball, ball goes in hole. How hard could it be? Turns out, pretty darn hard when you’re the one telling the computer what “hit ball” means.
First off, I needed a character. I sketched this little figure, kind of goofy, and named her Hattie. Don’t ask me why “Hattie,” it just popped into my head. Seemed to fit the slightly clumsy vibe I was already anticipating for the game itself.
Making Hattie actually do something was the first real headache.
- I spent ages just trying to get her to stand there without looking like she was about to fall over.
- Then, the golf swing. Oh boy. Getting the animation to look even remotely like a swing, and not like Hattie was having some kind of seizure, took days. Days, I tell you!
- I’d tweak a number, watch her arm flail wildly, sigh, and tweak it again. Over and over.
The “Golfing” Part
Once Hattie could sort of swing a club, I needed, well, a golf course. I started super basic. A flat green patch, a hole. My first “level.” Exciting stuff, I know. Getting the ball to roll felt like a small miracle. Then I tried to make it stop in the hole. That was another battle. Sometimes it’d just roll right over it, sometimes it’d bounce out like the hole was made of rubber.
I got a bit more ambitious after that.
“Let’s add sand traps!” I thought. “And water hazards!”
What a genius I was. More things to go wrong.
My sand traps initially acted more like quicksand. Hattie would get in, ball would get in, neither would come out.
And the water… don’t even get me started on the water physics. At one point, hitting the ball into the water made it shoot straight up into the sky like a rocket. Not exactly realistic, but pretty funny for a few minutes.
There were so many times I just wanted to shut the whole thing down. You know that feeling? When you’re staring at lines of code, or whatever it is, and it just looks like gibberish, and nothing you do makes it work? Yeah, plenty of those moments. I’d get Hattie stuck in a tree I added, or the ball would vanish into thin air. Poof! Gone. Scoreboard would show random numbers. Pure chaos.
Little Wins and What Came Out of It
But then, you’d fix one tiny thing. One stupid, tiny bug that had been driving you mad for hours. And suddenly, Hattie would hit the ball, it would land on the green, and maybe, just maybe, roll near the hole. Those little wins kept me going. Like, “Okay, I’m not a complete idiot. I can do this.”
I showed it to my kid eventually. He just laughed at how Hattie walked. Said it looked like she really needed to use the bathroom. Kids, eh? But he played it for a bit, which was kind of cool.
In the end, “hattie goes golfing” wasn’t going to win any awards. It’s still clunky. Hattie still walks a bit funny. But it works, mostly. I learned a ton, mostly about how much I didn’t know. And it actually did take my mind off things, which was the whole point, I guess. Sometimes just making something, anything, even if it’s a bit rubbish, is better than not making anything at all. It’s the process, the figuring stuff out, that’s the real takeaway. Got me thinking about what to try next, actually. Maybe not golf this time.
