Walkabout Mini Golf development studio Mighty Coconut is taking everything it learned from developing the best way to spend time with family and friends in VR and starting fresh with a new game. Walkabout Dungeon Golfer is in active development as something of a spin-off or sequel to Walkabout Mini Golf and being developed alongside new courses for the original. The new game is still centered on golfing but the gameplay loop around that activity is completely different, Lucas Martell explains on the Good VR Podcast. He cautions that they’re still prototyping, so things can change, but he offered some details about how they’re approaching its design. “What we have settled on is essentially that you’ve got sort of a small-ish dungeon that’s maybe like the size of three or four different holes kind of combined, but you’re able to freely kind of putt around it,” Martell explains. “And you do have enemies that have hit points and you do damage by putting into them. There’s an exploration element where you’re trying to putt around, you actually get power-ups by putting into cups that give you … health or attack. So very, very basic stat points. But ultimately it’s kind of a roguelite where you are playing through each of these different runs. So a run is not unlike a course. It probably takes twenty to thirty minutes or so. The thing that we have loved the most is that even in the prototypes we started building in multiplayer. So where it really gets interesting is when you do have multiple people in there and you’re able to strategize, you putt into this area which will lure this enemy out, and then I will be able to hit him from the back and use various different power-ups and abilities and in a cool way.” Good Virtual Reality is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The discussion with Martell is edited to just under 27 minutes with the podcasting platform Riverside and covers the full Walkabout path from inception to investment offers to layoffs earlier this year as well as the continuing independent spirit there grounded in creative artistry. It all started last decade with the founding of the studio on an island in Belize with artists gathered around the production of a short animated film called The OceanMaker. If you haven’t listened to the conversation with Shawn Whiting, who led community development at Rec Room for many years, the path that startup took over roughly the same period as Mighty Coconut makes for a useful companion conversation for understanding what it means to take outside investment in your company versus staying fully independent. “I’ve also seen so many companies kind of get yanked around. And we’ve seen this with all of the different studio closures that have happened where a company gets bought, and even if they are profitable,” Martell said. “There is this push to make 10x what they’re spending on stuff. And it just seems like it’s a very unsustainable model. And it also means that there’s a lot of times where you could have a game that, yeah, sure, it is making a profit, but it’s not enough. And you still end up getting shut down or something happens at the larger owner level where there’s a restructuring. And all of a sudden your mandate changes. I’ve done that dance before, especially in the film industry, and I just don’t like it. Yes, the more money is nice, but the more money comes with so many strings and so many concessions that it means that you can’t run things the way that makes sense. And currently we’re entirely player supported, which just means that what people are spending on the DLCs and the base game, that’s what’s going into development. That’s what allows us to keep making courses. I won’t say that it’s easy and it’s definitely gotten a lot harder this last year or two, just with everything going on in the industry, but we’re still able to make it work.” We also discuss the end of the Walkabout Mini Golf Pocket Edition’s development and how that relates to their strategy building a version of Walkabout Dungeon Golfer that runs on Steam and possibly for consoles with full cross-play to VR. Our conversation was recorded in August 2026 just before the release of the 1990s-inspired Gloop Lair, Walkabout Mini Golf’s 41st course and work is already underway on courses the studio is planning to release in 2028. You can watch the latest design tour with 3D artist Shane Rhodes the moment the course releases. You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism. https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
