Teeing Off With Glow Golf

Swap Clubs for Light in Glow Golf

Created by experimental games designer Alex Johansson, Glow Golf is a minimalist LED game that mimics a golf course through a line of light. Coloured lights represent elements of a golf course; green is grass, blue water is water, yellow is sand, dark green is rough, black is the hole and white is the ball.

The version that we have on temporary display (21/12/2024 to 19/01/2025) in the Museum utilises a unique torch input essentially using light itself as the drive and putter. Holding the torch further away will putt and roll the ball, and holding it nearer the sensor will hit the ball harder to drive over obstacles.

We recently chatted with Alex about his work with the NVM and his inspiration behind the Glow Golf.

We recently chatted with Alex about his work with the NVM and his inspiration behind the Glow Golf.

Could you tell us a little more about yourself and the various projects you have worked on?

My name is Alex Johansson, I’m an experimental games designer and educator based in Sheffield, I’ve been building games for over a decade and have a particular interest in alternative controllers. I’ve developed board games, mobile apps, computer games, projection mapped installations and recently I’ve been exploring light installations.

You recently worked with The National Videogame Museum and the Children’s Capital of Culture on their Plug In and Play adventure trail in Rotherham and did a fantastic job designing and creating all the games alongside David Hayward. How did you find the project and what were your favourite creations?

It was such a privilege to work on that project! I particularly liked that we managed to build experiences that weren’t screen based, including some games that were completely non-digital such as Frog Tipping. This was a magnetic fishing game about cleaning litter from the River Don which we set up in Rotherham Minster, it ended up being the sleeper hit of the festival!

My favourite creation out of what we built was Runner Bees; players have to recreate mosaics of flowers by running around a circuit with buckets of ball pool balls. The flower designs were shown on a Vestaboard, a departure board style display that made very satisfying sounds as it flipped through all the panels. What was such a lovely element of Runner Bees was when we tested it in schools, we had intended it as a competitive experience between teams, but we found when we exhibited it at Plug In and Play many players were happily content just working together cooperatively to complete the patterns, a much more peaceful experience.

Generally we found it fascinating seeing the different methods of play that emerged from testing it with audiences and hope there’s an opportunity soon to test them again. It was wonderful getting to design games for such a variety of spaces and such a pleasure to work with David, the NVM and CCOC.

We’re very excited to be exhibiting Glow Golf as part of our Christmas programme Illuminate the Play. Could you tell us more about the game itself and the inspiration behind it?

Glow Golf is a minimalist, experimental LED game. The project is an attempt to bake golf down to a line of light and one input. The colours correspond to the elements of a golf course; Green is grass, blue is water, yellow is sand, dark green is rough, black is the hole and white is the ball. The input for the museum is a light sensor, where depending on how far away you hold a light source determines how far the ball will go.

The inspiration for Glow Golf came from wanting to design games experiences that could reach unconventional spaces and audiences isolated from the games industry. LEDs are this wonderful medium that the public really seems to be drawn to. They’re also lightweight, relatively cheap, vibrant and quick to build experiences for. The audiences I’m particularly interested in engaging are the elderly and young people with disabilities. I’ve been running workshops over the last year with the latter group and hope this year to run playtests with older audiences and people with dementia.

The game is a brilliant piece of kit, fun to play and visually stunning to look at with its bright colours! How did you put the game together? What were the challenges of creating Glow Golf?

So the main barriers for creating Glow Golf was creating the hardware and software. I had to learn how to design my own chips, how to solder circuit boards, how to code in C++ and fabricating a physical case to contain the project. Most conventional games are built in game engines which do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but with installation design using LEDs it’s very much do it yourself. It’s the equivalent of both building a tiny games console and a tiny game engine to build your games inside of.  

Having said that, there are simpler options available for budding enthusiasts, if you can get a hold of a BBC Micro:Bit it is possible to link those up to programmable LED strips (Neopixel) in a relatively straightforward manner!

The game mimics playing Golf on a multitude of randomly designed courses with lights representing the putting green, sand bunkers and other obstacles. What were the challenges when programming the game?

The biggest challenge was the initial hump of learning C++, it’s a very complicated language and as someone who prior to working with LEDs primarily worked with just drag and drop based visual scripting tools, it was a heck of a jump. Some of the largest challenges came early on from not having enough memory; It might not seem like much in the face of modern games consoles, but on micro-computers it’s quite hard to store hundreds of different colours of LEDs without running out of memory or massively slowing down the game! Thankfully I was able to figure it out by upgrading the hardware I used and learning how to make my code more efficient.

The game’s controller is certainly unique! Could you tell us more about this design and the thought behind it?

So the controller in the exhibit featured at the NVM is a light sensor. You shine the torch at various distances and it launches the ball depending on the strength of light detected. It is one of many different inputs for my light experiences I’m considering. My ambition over the next year is to build out a suite of different types of controller, I previously made a pinball launcher out of a walking stick and am currently working on building a durable games controller that uses a door handle as the primary input. There’s so many objects that people interact with in our day to day lives which are intuitive to operate which would make great inputs for games, by contrast for many people the gamepad is quite an alienating and intimidating interface.

Are there any techniques to playing the game you can recommend to our visitors?

The main trick; Less is more! Whilst it might be tempting to whack the ball as hard and as far as possible, sometimes a little tap is more effective than a drive in getting the ball to its destination, particularly given the number of obstacles!

At the National Videogame Museum we feel it is vital to celebrate indie developers and bring their work to a wider audience. Why do you feel it is important to have games like Glow Golf represented in Museums?

I think it’s important to have unusual inputs such as alternative controllers in museums because it challenges the assumption that gamepads are the optimal way to play games, rather than one step along a long line of different ways we engage with technology. Alternative controllers are often these beautiful artefacts that sadly often end up in landfill if they aren’t actively preserved and documented. That’s definitely easier said than done though, keeping my own installations maintained is a challenge in itself, never mind an entire exhibition!

Alex alongside David Hayward also helped design the unique controller for Shutterbug (pictured) that featured on the Plug In and Play trail. Shutterbug is now available to play here at the Museum.

Can you tell us about any upcoming projects you’re working on?

Next year the focus is going to be designing and testing games experiences with the elderly, I think they’re a sorely overlooked audience for games and there’s so much potential for experimentation with playful, low scope projects that could add enrichment to their lives. I’ll be starting with one of the installations from Plug in and Play; Radiant Vines, it’s a simple game where you “water plants” with light which grows LED vines that blossom into flowers. I also plan to run workshops getting them to build cardboard controllers from craft materials to surface what inputs are intuitive to them and ask them what kinds of games they’re interested in experiencing.

Photo credits: Alex Johansson (unless otherwise stated).