Following the release of Everybody’s Golf, I was involved in a hardcore forum community of players who loved the game, but were disappointed with the lack of social features and ways to compare each other’s abilities, especially when different time zones made it difficult for us to compete on the course concurrently. With this in mind, I set out to create a remote, self-sufficient leader board to log scores gained by players from across each of the courses to provide asynchronous competition. This was tracked within a [clubhouse standings spreadsheet here].

These scores also amounted to a handicap value which was used to define each player’s skill-set; the more scores that were input by other players, the more accurate the handicaps would become. These handicaps were then used to define pools for tournaments and were also taken into account for final competition tallys to ensure parity and balance. In addition, each tournament was randomly generated from a preset list of variables and was split into several rounds before a final head to head play-off.