Go behind the scenes of Walkabout Mini Golf's new 90s pop culture-inspired course, Gloop Lair with our video tour hosted by Mighty Coconut's Shane Rhodes. The new course is available now on Meta Quest, Steam, PlayStation VR2, and Pico.
Gloop Lair is the forty-first course in Walkabout, and the fifth in the Evil Lairs series, featuring maps of the hideouts of fictional villains. Gloop Lair takes its cues from the 1990s, with the titular gloop standing in for Nickelodeon's famous slime, and a veritable treasure trove of pop culture references from that time. After the tour, I did a brief interview with Shane to learn more about how the course came to be.
The full tour can be viewed on our YouTube channel here:
On Drawing Inspiration From The 90s
Rhodes: For these other courses we have a lot of varying ages on the team to start with. So everyone's kind of had their hearkening back to things that they love and all that jazz and some of us '90s babies were starting to grow in numbers here in the team. So I think we got a nice total of four or something like that. So, we eventually had our day and we had our new level designer come in, Laura Krauss quite a while back now, but she was starting to headline all these new courses and one of them was this Gloop Lair course and it was one that even Lucas at one point was like, 'Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't really see.' I think he was just, you know, outside of that '90s era. So, he wasn't seeing the total vision yet. But then Laura kind of laid out everything that would be in it and kind of ran them through like a prototype of it as it were and he's like, 'Okay, yeah, I totally see it. I totally see it.' So really this became a push from all of us that grew up in the '90s to be like, 'Well, we have to have our representation in an evil lair, of course.' So that's probably the origin, I'd say, from that.
And then it just really grew from, as you start in these courses, your memory starts to unlock all the stuff you remember playing with as a kid and watching in theaters and eating all the snacks and the sodas and the things like that. And then it just starts to kind of all come together. One thing that kind of developed, I think, along the course as we went along is the Evil Lairs always have a pretty defined evil plan to go. And the world being a little whatever at this point, we're like, we need a little optimism in here. So she became more of a chaotic good in a way because her real ideal is to Gloop the city and bring back some joy from the '90s and all this fun stuff though, of course, that goes awry. I know we saw the pizza rat in the sewer earlier. Perhaps things don't go so well.
One Specific Easter Egg To Look Out For
Rhodes: Yeah, I definitely recommend the band. We have a lot of props, we'll say, that are direct puns or references to the '90s era bands that we all enjoyed. So, definitely go out and look for those.
Oh, you know what? I did just think of another one that I really love, too. So, we have kind of our own little let's say the bestselling toy of this era for the Gloop Lair uh is this little guy called Kerbo. So, you're the little Kerbo. You speak to him. He [has] a little animatronic voice. There's a couple of those throughout the course, but you might find one in particular that is particularly evil. So, that there is one of those to find for sure.
On The Increasing Course Complexity Extending Build Times
Shane: We are as we learn more and do more, we're able to definitely output a bit more as we do each one though that can sometimes bite us a little bit too. We might bite off a little bit more than we can chew. So for at the end of every course that we do we do a kind of a postmortem, so to be like okay what things went well what things didn't go well and we always try to keep that in mind for the next course. That works sometimes. Sometimes you repeat mistakes so you get carried away. But yeah, it does things like this course where a lot of it is indoors we're able to get away with a lot more density and props and things like that. And it was kind of similar in [Passport] Hollywood too where you had those sound stages.
So the god mode view is very minimal, but once you're inside those sound stages, you can really fill it with stuff and you don't get too much of a performance hit. And the same is true of the lair here because it's all very sectioned out into the different factory rooms and all that. We have run ourselves into some corners every now and then where we're [in] outdoor areas. We're like 'oh we may have gone too dense.' Much to the chagrin of our poor tech team who has to make it optimized. We try to manage in the courses and bring something new whether it's going to be the most animations, the most graphics, or visual graphics I should say like artwork and all that, or new gameplay mechanics, something like that. So we want to keep doing a balance where there's going to be more simple courses, there might be more dense courses. It just is going to be depending on what calls for the story.
On The Evil Lairs Series Continuing Into The 2000s
Rhodes: Well, I'll say there isn't a plan for one yet, but never say never, of course. I'm pretty sure there was a couple of villains lairs were like, 'Okay, this is the last one.' But then, you know, an idea comes up. So, I think it's one of those types of things. I won't say no, but I won't say yes.
Idea(s) Left On The Cutting Room Floor
Rhodes: There was one that I was pretty sure was going to be cut out, but it's the finale for Hard mode. And I threw out this idea that I knew was going to be shut down. I'm like, 'feel free to say no to this,' but they said, 'Okay.' So, I really implore everyone to finish the hard mode to see the great reveal at the end of that because that is fun to see. So, that's one that made it. So, that's a cheat answer because that one actually made it.
There were certain toys or uh uh movie references that we'd want to use, but we just couldn't. There was no way to make it kind of shout out what we were saying without it being a direct reference to it and then getting into a territory where we'd have to ask permission and it just wouldn't work out.
Striking The Balance Between Homage And Direct Ripoff
Rhodes: Well, a lot of it is definitely context. The nice area thing is that in this area, it's all kind of her collections of these things. So once you kind of get one reference, you're like oh now you're starting to look out for it and you're starting to place it a little bit more. It can be difficult. It's definitely difficult up front, especially if you are a fan of that thing because then you just want to make that thing, and I've had a few of those. I'm guilty of that where I'd present a model, they'd be like, 'Well, this looks way too much like that thing.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, you're right.' There's definitely some remake there, but that was a great stretch in creativity too, because you have to think of how to maintain that same feeling without directly ripping someone off. There's always some credence and stuff too, because it is a bit of a satire and all that other stuff. So, it's really just kind of calling out to these things that inspired us when we were younger.
As always, UploadVR thanks the team at Mighty Coconut for being so generous with their time.
