Meow Wolf Development Insights

Hello Walkabout Players!

Colby Morgan here, Technical Director at Mighty Coconut. I wanted to pull back the curtain and show the development of some of our exciting Meow Wolf features. It's been so awesome to see all of the great reactions to the Multi-Ball feature in our new course, Meow Wolf. The underlying system and features have been in the works for a while. We wanted to share the journey to this point and the design of these new systems.

For anyone who hasn't had a chance to play our latest course, Meow Wolf, I would highly recommend stop reading and go try it out first.

Multi-Ball is a new feature on our course, Meow Wolf. We have prisms on various holes that, if you hit them, your ball will split into multiple balls on the green. Once all of the balls have stopped moving, all of the balls will resolve to the ball closest to the hole.

It all started with the stink ball in Labyrinth. It was the first time we were applying a persistent state to the ball. We initially had some discussion about whether we wanted to put a larger system around state management for the ball, but since it was just a one-off effect, we just decided to do a really simple system that just turned on a particle system with stink lines.

Fast forward a few courses, and when we started working on Laser Lair, we initially were just going to have the ball reset when it hit a laser. However, the idea of seeing your ball slice and fly off was too fun to pass up. Around the same time, we were doing mechanic prototypes for Meow Wolf, and it quickly became clear how many new mechanics the course would require.

The requirements for Laser Lair, Meow Wolf, and [UNANNOUNCED COURSE] highlighted the need for a comprehensive system to track and apply various ball states. Thus, we developed the Ball Modifier System. This system was architecturally designed to enable the creation and management of new ball behaviors, structured through modifiers and modifier groups. This design allowed for flexibility in combining and iterating modifiers without the need for new, standalone systems.

Meow Wolf introduced an interesting challenge just with the sheer amount of new mechanics. But the one that stuck out as the biggest challenge, and one of my favorites, was Multi-Ball. There is a lot of custom physics we are running under the hood to have our golf ball behave as realistically as possible. So for Multi-Ball, it wasn't just as easy as turning on the 10 spheres in the engine. We had to make each Multi-Ball run our custom golf ball physics system and make sure it was performant enough to run concurrently with all the other Multi-Balls.

Integrating Multi-Ball with multiplayer and replay systems posed another layer of complexity. With up to 12 extra balls that had to be tracked across the network and cached for replays, we had to look at how to keep those packets as efficient as possible. Up to that point, most of the systems around the holes worked with the assumption there was only a single player ball. We had to then comb through our systems to make sure they architecturally supported multiple balls associated with a single player.

As we started designing Meow Wolf, we also found areas where we needed to control the spread and speed at which the Multi-Balls were fired from the prisms. Hole 9 and 14 on Meow Wolf Hard is one where we iterated quite a bit on finding enough spread where you could still somewhat control where your ball would end up but still have some of the variability.

After the first few iterations of Multi-Ball, it was clear we needed an obvious visual that would show you where your ball was resolving to. We initially had the balls stagger move in a straight line to the closest ball, but noticed that it was too common for the balls to clip into other geometry, making it too easy to miss where the final resolve point was. We went with the spiraling resolve pattern because it would arc up and reduce the amount of geometry they would clip through. Also, you will notice that we have the ball arc up even higher if they are resolving to a Multi-Ball in the hole.

Thanks to our Alpha/Beta users, we also realized that closer is not always better. For example, on Meow Wolf Easy/Hard hole 14, your Multi-Balls can technically resolve to the closest ball to the hole but it may be blocked by a wall. Because of this, we implemented "preferred zones" where the Multi-Ball system would try to resolve to a ball in a preferred zone even if it wasn't technically the closest.

Post-Multi-Ball development, we found ourselves with a much more streamlined system. We didn’t just add a new feature; we enhanced our entire infrastructure, paving the way for even more exciting developments.

So, to our fantastic players, your enthusiasm for Meow Wolf has been the fuel to our creative fire. We've got some thrilling courses and mechanics up our sleeves, and we can’t wait to unveil them to you.

For any further questions, you can join us on Discord where we have a dedicated support team of veteran moderators and Coconuts, or drop us a DM on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!

Many thanks,

Colby M.

Technical Director