Magical Mulligans: ‘Walkabout Mini Golf’ Launches New Alfheim - Land of the Elves DLC Course

Get ready to add some enchantment to your short game: Today, developer Mighty Coconut adds its latest DLC course and 21st course overall, Alfheim - Land of the Elves to VR putter’s paradise Walkabout Mini Golf!

Based on the magical realm from Norse mythology, Alfheim features unique curves, secret glens, undiscovered alcoves, graceful arches, and sacred cathedrals of leaves set amidst a gleaming, spiritual place untouched by time. Alfheim is a serene and timeless course where you can play forever and—if you long for magical powers, admire supernatural beauty, and feel ambivalent towards everyday people—you, too, can be an Elf in this spellbinding and relaxing forest hideaway.

To celebrate today’s launch, we sat down with Walkabout Mini Golf Creator and Mighty Coconut Executive Producer Lucas Martell for an elven education.

Lucas Martell: I got my start in the animation world. I made a short film called Pigeon: Impossible that was picked up by Fox and became the basis for Spies in Disguise starring Will Smith and Tom Holland. It was the last Blue Sky film that came out.

So I had spent a long time writing, directing, doing a lot of development work and pitching in the animation space. Mighty Coconut started out as an animation studio—more work-for-hire, although we were also doing a lot of development of our own stuff as well including animation and a couple of mobile games. And then heading into and during the pandemic, I’d been playing around with a couple of different game ideas and frankly, a lot of it was for me. It was an opportunity to keep my hands on the actual making of something because it kind of reached the point with the animation where I was directing and writing but most of it was sitting in meetings.

So making games was kind of my outlet. Walkabout started off before the pandemic, but once the pandemic hit, I had a little bit of time, things were slower, and it was just a good time to actually focus on getting it done. It was pretty much a solo project, and then, after the release of it, I added a couple more people to the team, and now we’ve reached a point where we’re about 30 people working full-time, mostly focusing on all the upcoming courses and new features and just the ongoing development of the game.

LM: It actually started off as a phone game. It was originally designed as a game that you play by physically swinging your device, and your phone just became essentially your putter and your camera into this virtual world. And then when the original Quest came out, we already had it running on the phone, so it was a very easy thing to port over for VR.

And it worked so well. All of the physics just worked because we had already done all the work to really dial all that stuff in. It just works so well for VR because it’s a 1:1 relationship with the real world. If you’re good at golf in real life, you’re going to be really good at this game. It takes almost no time to learn how to play it.

But there’s also a near infinite amount of replayability. Because of the physics, we’ve got people who have played every course 30, 40, or 50 times—because every round can be different and there are some crazy trick shots you can do. There’s always going to be that little bit of imperfection that you’re going to have if you just change your speed ever so slightly. It really does make it dynamic, so people keep going back and playing.

And then I would say that probably the other big thing is that, during development, there was no multiplayer. That was actually a last-minute addition because you guys had been urging me to do that. At the time, there weren’t that many VR headsets out. I didn’t know that Quest 2 was going to launch literally a couple of weeks after we did. The Meta Quest team convinced me to add multiplayer. I didn’t initially think that the social aspect of playing mini golf was going to be that big of a sell. But then, as soon as I played my first round, I think it was with my dad, who I was using as a beta tester, we got multiplayer booted up. It was like, “Wow, it’s actually like being in the same room as you.”

It’s one of those things that it’s hard to wrap your head around how different that feels, but once you’re in it, you get it instantly. And it just really turns it from a golf game into as much of a socializing opportunity as anything.

LM: Games pull from pretty much everything. I definitely feel like, from the film world, a lot of the designs, a lot of the aesthetic choices, come into play. We don’t necessarily think of an explicit story in the more literal sense, but we’re definitely leaning into more of a theme park version of the story. In fact, one of our designers, Don Carson, is a former Imagineer, so he’s really brought that idea of storytelling through the environment to the game. It’s not explicitly required for something like a mini golf game, but it really does make the experience feel a lot richer. It gives some purpose and just lets us have some fun and do some unexpected things because, with each course, we’re kind of crafting a bit of a story that you’re walking through.

Also, just from the more nuts-and-bolts stuff of animation, there are a good number of similarities. When I started doing game design, I already knew how to animate. I already knew how to get in the model, and I already knew how to do a pretty good chunk of those initial pieces that you need in order to be able to get something that looks good up on the screen basically.

Game design pulls from a lot of those things, but there are a good number of differences. Especially the designing for VR, I think that it might actually help that I don’t come from a more traditional game background—just because VR is different enough to design for and there are certain things that matter much more in VR than they do in a traditional game. Coming from the outside, I didn’t come in with a lot of those preconceived ideas of how things were done that I had to sort of unlearn. I came in pretty fresh, and from the get-go it’s always sort of like designing for VR from square one.

LM: Alfheim is based on the Norse legend of one of the nine realms. This is actually a course that’s been in development I believe the longest. I think that development on this one actually started back in 2020. It didn’t quite fit in the Lost City Series, so we decided to hold off on it for a little bit. We joke that it’s kind of gotten stopped, started, and stopped a few different times. It’s been going on for a very, very long time, but it is one of the most breathtaking courses that we’ve done by far.

It really came largely from a desire to create a course that almost had a meditative Zen quality where you just wanted to live here for a little while. And we like to really mix up our courses, so right before this, we had Laser Lair, which is a supervillain with lasers. It’s still a very cool place to hang out, but it’s also a bit more intense, and previous to that, we had Journey to the Center of the Earth. So we always try to balance stuff. It felt like we had done a couple that were a bit more adventurous or a bit more off-road, so we decided that now is the time to release this one that we’ve been working on for a while that is going to go back to basics a little bit, but also just be an absolutely just gorgeous place where you want to spend an afternoon.

LM: This was definitely one of the more challenging courses to build, largely just because we had kind of conceived this idea of all of this flowing, curvy architecture, which seems very simple. Yet when you actually get into building all of that and getting it to run on a headset, it’s a whole different can of worms. We really leaned into the curves as a mechanic, which is something that we’ve maybe done a little bit before. But on this one, a lot of the gameplay has this sort of wall-ride mechanic where the curves will allow you to sort of flow from one curve to the other as opposed to typical mini golf where you’re bouncing around stuff. This actually has you riding along the edges in a very different way. So it’s definitely a smoother, more elegant gameplay experience where we were kind of trying to mimic the architecture that is around you.

A lot of the anecdotes I have are very deep into the development because we’ve just been doing it for such a long time. It feels really good to finally get this one out thereafter after having spent years and years on it.

LM: If you look around the course, there are a lot of references to that larger Norse mythology, and we’ve got statues of various elements from the Prose Edda. We went deep into the research of the Norse mythology, and there’s a lot of influence from Viking architecture. It’s definitely a very architectural course, both in the design of the world around you and the holes themselves.

LM: That’s a good question. It’s always tough to answer that because we’ve got 21 courses now, and I always tend to be a little bit scarred by whatever just came out. I think that Laser Lair that just came out might be my favorite one. The gameplay of it is really fun and challenging, and it’s a very fun social experience. If you have friends that you like to give a hard time to, it’s a really good course for that. But if everyone’s rooting for your ball to sneak past those lasers in a really dramatic way, it tends to be just perfect for that too, and the environment of it is fantastic.

LM: Yeah, we’re always a little cautious about letting people know what’s next. One of the ones that we have announced is the Meow Wolf course that will be coming out before the end of the year, so we’ve been hard at work on that one for quite a while. I believe we’ve got 14 or 15 different courses that are in production, so coming from the film and TV world, we actually kind of tend to work a little bit like a TV studio. We’ve always got a couple of courses that are being written, a couple of courses that are shooting, a couple of courses that are in post-production, if you want to think of it like that.

At any given time, we’re usually pretty actively working on about a dozen courses, and we’ve already started the ones that are going to be coming out probably the first month or two of 2025. So we’ve got a lot of plans, and we’re going to be releasing new content, new courses for the foreseeable future.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your virtual putter, round up an elven friend or two, and check out Alfheim - Land of the Elves in Walkabout Mini Golf today.