Portals of Possibility: ‘Walkabout Mini Golf’ Adds New Meow Wolf Course

If you’ve been to a Meow Wolf installation, it hardly needs an introduction, but for the uninitiated, I’ll make an attempt. Meow Wolf is an art collective that blends sculpture, narrative, digital art, world building, and more to create large-scale projects that surprise, delight, sometimes confuse, and always inspire. And they’ve teamed up with our friends at Mighty Coconut to produce a brand-new course for Walkabout Mini Golf, out now on Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro and Rift.

Putt through portals of possibility in this wondrous, kaleidoscopic, experimental world of fun-filled play. Explore new realms of reality where an otherworldly being called Numina attempts to communicate to you through the language of mini golf. The fun is the journey as you encounter a fantastically vibrant environment full of curious creatures, whimsical gameplay mechanics, and limitless invitations to expand your game—and your mind.

The new course derives its genesis from Meow Wolf’s third and largest exhibition, Convergence Station in Denver—described as a multiversal transit station created by a rare cosmic event that joined four alien worlds.

According to Mighty Coconut Level Designer Henning Koczy, Meow Wolf sets new records for every metric the team has to measure a course. “Meow Wolf is undoubtedly our most complicated, experimental, colorful, and just plain weirdest course to date,” he says. “It breaks new ground for our studio, including in our techniques for counting what we pulled off here.”

Mechanics

“Every hole’s gameplay is in some way an experiment we’ve never run before,” says Koczy, “which makes the count of new mechanics 18 (or more)—the most new mechanics on one course we have ever done.”

Characters

“It depends on what you count as a character, as the whole course is alive in some way and some creatures can split into multiple parts,” explains Koczy. “But there are 12 unique, named character rigs, and 33 animated creatures altogether—in each case, the most we have ever done. As just one point of detail: The ‘catskin’ mesh was originally made up of around 1,300 individually modeled ‘noodles,’ and we probably had another couple hundred added after, so a decent estimate would be 1,500.”

Vegetation

“It is impossible to count the number of individual plants in Numina, and they may all just be one organism,” notes Koczy. “But I can say there are about 57 species of plant (or fungi), all of which had to be designed, modeled from scratch, colored, and placed by hand by Don Carson, Zach Alexander, and Emma Mercado. The portion of our polygon budget devoted to plant life is 60%—the most it has ever been.”

Versions

“The version count on our master Blender file, which can be looked at as a rough proportional approximation of how much work it took (how many person days + how many handoffs between people), passed 200 before Beta for the first time,” Koczy says. “By comparison, Babylon’s version count stands at just 46.”

Special Effects

“The swirling portals, the caustics and oily fog, the speckled light projections, the underwater vertex distortion, the multiball split and rejoining, the ‘Cosmohedron particle collider, the ripple effects on sub-dimensional ball bounces—this course has more new special shader effects than any other,” Koczy points out, “which were worked out by our tech and lighting team of Jeff Bull Jr., Colby Morgan, Tony Davidson, Ryan Sizemore, and Chase Shields.”

So... a pretty impressive feat, by any measure. Still, as unabashed Meow Wolf and Walkabout stans, we had to know more. And that’s where Mighty Coconut Senior Art Director Don Carson tees off!

Don Carson: Video game design and, more recently, VR game design has been an offshoot and (to me) a logical evolution of the work I have spent a career doing in the themed entertainment design business, most notably designing for theme parks like those produced by Disney and Universal. I saw such strong parallels between the work Mighty Coconut was doing and the work I had done over the years, and I wrote Lucas Martell and his team of coconuts a fan letter that led to my joining the team two years ago.

DC: At Mighty Coconut, we love to surprise our players with delightfully unexpected environments for them to play mini golf within. From time to time, this includes our partnering with outside IPs that we feel are best in line with our game’s aesthetics and our sensibilities as a team. The suggestion of working with Meow Wolf came about during a design retreat over a year ago. In the past, our IP partnerships would interpret the creative content produced by these organizations. But as big fans of the innovative work being done by the Meow Wolf team, we saw the potential of co-creating a course with their talented artists. Amazingly, Meow Wolf Founder and Director Vince Kadlubek was already a fan of Walkabout Mini Golf, so the conversation and connection was immediate and we started working on how we might be able to work together.

DC: We came into our work with Meow Wolf with few expectations beyond the fact that we were looking to co-design whatever it was they felt best represented their unique brand and aesthetic. It was Vince’s idea that we focus on an environment that currently exists in Meow Wolf’s growing lore, specifically the multi-dimensional swamp known as Numina, currently featured in Convergence Station in their Denver exhibit space. The genius stroke came from the decision to partner us with Numina’s creator, Meow Wolf Co-Founder Caity Kennedy.

DC: It’s safe to say that the new Meow Wolf course is unlike anything else we’ve produced in the past. Apart from wanting to represent the Meow Wolf brand authentically, we knew that meant giving up any expectations of how that partnership would ultimately manifest. It turns out that the six-dimensional nature of Numina encouraged us to embrace very unconventional ways in which to play a round of mini golf. Every hole is unique, and most challenge the players to decipher just what might happen next to both them and their ball as they make their way through the course. Our more traditional players may be taken aback by just how unique this course is, but it’s our hope that they will release themselves to the beauty of the space and ultimately embrace the unexpected.

DC: Without a doubt, the collaboration with Caity Kennedy has been the very best part of working on this project. We were very lucky that Caity was already familiar with the VR design tools we use to create Walkabout, so she was able to jump right in and get hands-on throughout the entire design process. Surprisingly, since as Numina’s originator, Caity has very specific guidelines regarding how we might interpret the environment and its inhabitants, she was also very willing to allow our artists room to play as well. I think we’re all very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve together.

DC: The Meow Wolf Numina environment is honestly beyond description and must be experienced in VR to get the full effect of what we’ve been able to collectively create. Even with that, our most common reaction has been a state of awe, not purely due to Numina’s beauty but the fact that this has been achieved within the confines of a miniature golf game adhering to the strict limitations of low-poly world building. During our testing, we’ve heard a variety of responses, but mostly we hear that everyone is struck by just how lovely and unexpected the space is—much like the physical Numina in Denver.

DC: It would be a lie to say that the Meow Wolf course wasn’t challenging. Numina is a lush, organic environment, something that can be particularly hard to represent within the confines of game creation of today’s standalone VR headsets. Ultimately, it was the partnership of Caity Kennedy and Emma Mercado, one of our lead 3D artists, as they worked to stay organic and true to the Numina exhibit experience but within the limits of today’s technology. Caity has been realistic and flexible along the way, undoubtedly due to her years of experience creating highly themed physical attractions that have their own limitations and requirements.

DC: Lucas Martell and I officially met with Caity Kennedy in Denver in August 2022 where she introduced us to Numina not as purely a fanciful collection of otherworldly elements but as a six-dimensional entity. Numina engages with its visitors through its environment and inhabitants, and we quickly realized that we needed to become both explorers and botanists to better understand how we might interpret this design as a mini golf course. Ultimately it was Numina itself that inspired the idea that it was they that would be trying to communicate with both us and our players through the language of mini golf—or its best guess as to what this game is and what might be its rules of engagement.

DC: Ultimately it has been the collaboration between our two creative organizations that has made Meow Wolf such a wonderful and obvious choice for Walkabout. We know that it will test our players, but we hope it’s in the best possible way. We’re also very happy that the Meow Wolf course reasserts the fact that our fans can never second guess what we might be working on next.

DC: I had only known Meow Wolf from their reputation and from having devoured any media about their unique organization. It was most likely the Meow Wolf: Origin Story documentary that cemented the idea that these folks would be wonderful to work with if we ever got the chance. Luckily that opportunity came about, and I couldn’t be more overjoyed that it did. I can’t wait to see what Meow Wolf does next, and having had a chance to look behind the curtain of what they’re working on, our Meow Wolf course is just another manifestation of the creative minds of Meow Wolf helped along the way with our small team of fans and lovers of everything they do.

DC: Never underestimate what’s possible when creative minds come together, but know that all of this effort was ultimately done for our players and anyone else that decides to don a VR headset and explore that fantastical landscape of Numina.

DC: That’s hard to say. We love all of our previous courses, and we have more coming that we can’t talk about and that are quickly becoming our favorites—we can’t wait for you to experience them for yourselves!

DC: VR is a new medium and one that people are slowly discovering for themselves. All along, we at Mighty Coconut have worked to explore the potential of this new form of entertainment through the creation of engaging environments for the purpose of people getting together and interacting with each other—in our case through a round of mini golf, but if you listen to the reviews and comments from our players, Walkabout delivers something more, something that we are quite seriously dedicated to delivering with each and every new course we release.

DC: We can’t wait to hear what you have to say about our Meow Wolf collaboration, and we hope you’ll stay to see what we have coming next in 2024.