Blokhaven is course number forty for Walkabout Mini Golf and the third new course in 2026. We toured the cozy seaside dock course with the team from Mighty Coconut and sat down to go more in depth on the course design and musical composition process.
The full tour is available on UploadVR’s Youtube channel. This article is a full transcription of the interview.
UploadVR: “Hey, it’s Mike Johnson from UploadVR. I’m here with some of the team from Mighty Coconut to talk about their new course, Blokhaven. So, I guess gentlemen, introduce yourselves and what your positions are at Mighty Coconut.“
Henning: “My name’s Henning. I am a lead level designer at Mighty Coconut. Hi.“
Lucas: “And I’m Lucas Martell, I’m the creator of Walkabout Mini Golf.“
Chris: “And I’m Chris Reyman, I make the music for Walkabout Mini Golf.“
UploadVR: “Okay. So Henning, as I understand it, this was your brainchild. We just did the tour right before we sat down to do this interview, so this was kind of a course that you championed, that you wanted to put together. What was the primary driving inspiration for this, for Blokhaven?“
Henning: “The inspiration was this design movement called Bauhaus. I’m sure any designers or artists will have heard of that. In the late 19-teens, Bauhaus was a design movement that sprung out of wanting to do less with more minimalism. It was a reaction to the Victorian ornamentation and excess. Boy, I sound really nerdy right now.“
UploadVR: “No, you’re fine. It’s a developer interview, these are meant to be nerdy.“
Henning: “The primary principle of Bauhaus design would be ‘form has to follow function’. In other words, the function comes first, and whatever the piece of design or art has to function as, you design the form with as little ornamentation and extra stuff as possible just to perform that function. So, it results in a minimalist look where they don’t need a lot of colors, they don’t need a lot of crazy intricate shapes. It’s kind of back to basics: blocks, cubes, half circles, arches. And yeah, so that’s the look of it, kind of through and through.“
UploadVR: “Were there instances where something came back and you said, ‘Okay, that’s a little too detailed,’ or ‘We need to pull this back because it was a bit too much for this specific course,’ that maybe in another course would’ve slid right through and made it in?“
Lucas: “I know something that you mentioned in the tour that I could even set up would be that a lot of times some of the set dec[oration] that we do, which is what we call all the extra little bits that we add on, like, I think we did a pass initially where there was ivy and a couple of things, and that was just too much. If it was too much detail that was getting added in, it really sort of fought with it. I think what helped with this course, though, was the really, really vibrant color palette kind of made it that you didn’t want to have all of those extra little things cluttering up these beautiful, artfully arranged viewpoints that you’re getting.“
Henning: “Yeah, to look at it as we’re looking at it behind us, with those bold colors that are about as far apart from each other as possible, it is very busy just to start with. Like, the blocks being arranged are busy already, so the set dec on top of that in some places ended up being too much and we had to pare down from that. And yeah, make some decisions to stick to the minimalism.“
UploadVR: “Along the same lines, this feels like one of the more lived-in courses in Walkabout. A lot of the courses, it’s just kind of you and whoever you’re playing with on the course. This one is a fully functioning city, there’s all kinds of animations here, people working in different roles. What inspired wanting to do a full-on town versus what you’ve done in the past, which is just kind of a beautiful space but a more empty space with not a lot of people in it?“
Henning: “My initial conception of this place was more of an art void space, like just pure design in a black or white sphere with nothing outside of it. But then, Lucas and Don convinced me that that was too nerdy, too empty, too stark… too dead. And we came up with the idea of the ship crashing and supplying this town with the blocks needed to build a fully functioning town. And then from there we had to build block people made out of the same blocks. And yeah, it just became a very busy town.“
Lucas: “Yeah, this is definitely the most active course. You can probably even tell from the sounds that you might be hearing around us, but there’s just a whole lot of activity, a whole lot of people moving around, there’s construction on the back half of the island that you can hear off in the distance. I think one of the other things as well is that when we go more minimal with the style, it also means that then we can do some other things. And so I think that in this case, being able to build out a whole lot of the town that we normally wouldn’t ever fully build to the same level became possible because we weren’t as constrained trying to cram every single polygon we could get right into the area around the golf course itself.
So that’s one of the benefits of when we go a little bit simpler, that then we can also go bigger. And I do think that because the design of it and just the look of those blocks and everything stacked on top of each other, it kind of became necessary to build out that entire town because even when you’re at a distance like this looking back, you still need to feel like it’s all functioning, like there’s all stuff going on in there. And yeah, just the fact that there’s so much extra stuff, I think from a distance you really feel that it’s this lived-in world.“
UploadVR: “Chris. So a lot of composers in video games, there’s a specific tone that the game or the series might go for and it tends not to deviate from that too much. You have a very special job because this is the 40th course of Walkabout Mini Golf, and you’ve composed 40 very, very, very different scores for all those courses. Talk to me about the process of just trying to context switch over and over and over again. Is that a challenge for you to be going from, okay, this one is nautical jazz, and going from that to Passport Hollywood to Tokyo, having to switch your focus between those different styles as you’re composing?“
Chris: “Well, I mean just in terms of there being such vastly different styles, one of the things that we’ve talked about is something like this course, I can imagine this expanding and being something more. I did the music for this course and thought, well, that could be a whole album. It’s just like every course seems like a teaser in a way. It’s like this could be expanded into a whole universe or Walkabout Mini Golf the movie or the series, right? But you know, it’s really cool to be able to just immerse myself in this sort of vibe for a while and then turn around and do something else like Hollywood and be in that world.
So I mean that’s just an exciting part of this work is being able to do all those different styles as opposed to like, oh, we’ve done this haunted house game and now everything I do is always only going to be in that sort of vibe and genre for the next four years. That would be kind of crazy-making. And in our process, I found that having a couple different courses I’m working on and bouncing back and forth from that are in vastly different styles, I find that just to be more helpful for me just in my process. It’s not that it’s hard to switch, it’s that the switching helps reinvigorate the creativity I think, and just kind of work on one for a while and then say, you know what, I’ll just focus on this other vibe for a while and get into a whole different headspace.“
UploadVR: “How early in the design process do you get involved, Chris? Can you see some of the course before you start composing? How far along is the course when you get involved?“
Chris: “It really depends. It kind of depends on my schedule more than anything else, but when we started this 40-some courses ago, there was a bunch of things built out, but I was composing music based on just a one-line phrase of something, almost like a storyboard. Now, things are trucking along so efficiently at Mighty Coconut that I can go check out things that I haven’t even started talking to Lucas about yet in terms of the music and get some vibes on what it is.
You know, this course I think I was able to pop in before we talked about it. And as soon as I landed here I was like, I get it. And then when we talked about it, it just kind of confirmed that, and then hearing Henning was the one that sort of came up with this idea like it should be nautical jazz, that just kind of clicked for me and made a very clear picture of what that’s supposed to be. So yeah, I mean I’ve seen it evolve, because when we talked about it, I don’t think there were any characters, there was none of the puppetry happening yet. But I think by the time I got here, there was a story with this shipwreck. Lucas would know better sort of where I end up coming in because he’s part of the whole process.“
Lucas: “Yeah, I mean it’s usually fairly well along, and I think the main thing is that we want to make sure that everything has time to gel and we really know what the course is, and sometimes also what the music needs to bring to it. Because sometimes there will be an element like maybe there is a cozy vibe or an activeness that the music needs to help if we didn’t quite get there purely on visuals alone.
Chris: “Yeah, I mean I was gonna say it does need to be very established what’s going on ’cause I could be working on this as what it is, and then all of a sudden someone’s like, you know what, it’s supposed to be on the moon actually. So yeah, it’s got to be pretty gelled, yeah.“
Henning: “When I’m designing I put a temp track in just to have something to listen to that gives me the vibe of this place. How much do you hear that, Chris? And how much does that influence where you go? The temp track I chose for this one was Portico Quartet. If you want more music like this, go check them out. Portico Quartet.“
Chris: “You know, temp tracks I think are always sort of a touchy subject with composers ’cause it is a tricky thing to try and capture the vibe of some music that someone’s heard in its full form. And the music you shared was good! I really dig their stuff. And it does set the scene, and so it was helpful for me just to have access to that and listen to it and kind of try and piece apart what about this makes it work. Did that track have saxophone on it? Was that part of the element that sort of made it make sense?“
Lucas: “It had sax, but it didn’t have any of the… I think all the other instruments were different because you leaned into a more… like when we said nautical jazz, I think the only thing that had was saxophone and sort of the six eight sort of rolling vibe, but that was really just the two elements that were similar.“
Chris: “Yeah, and having something like that is super helpful. It’s like, okay, saxophone, that kind of makes it sound more modern and like European I guess in the way that it was used, and more like jazz, and that gets you a long way there just having that little lift off point.“
UploadVR: “Lucas, this is the 40th course in Walkabout Mini Golf. That’s kind of a big number. How did you fall on this one being number 40? Was there any thought to shifting around the schedule, or is 40 not a significant number?“
Lucas: “You know, I think that we think a little less about the exact number and it’s usually more how it all fits together. Generally, we tend to think in years, and throughout the year we’re trying to hit a wide variety of tones. So a lot of times, it depends more what’s around it, and we want to make sure that if we’ve got something that has similar elements that we’re able to push them aside. I will say that this one was actually a bit of a schedule change because there is a course that’s coming up that I think we’ve pushed off till October that this one swapped with because that one just needed a little bit more time, and because Henning really nailed the design and the gameplay of this one so early on, it was just in a better spot that we were able to release it earlier.
So we don’t tend to do that very often, but occasionally for production reasons, we’re just like, man, this one needs a little more time to cook and this one is really ready to go, so we poured gas onto this one. And I think that it worked absolutely fantastically because yeah, sometimes things just click and they come together faster, and sometimes they need another couple months.“
Henning: “I didn’t know I was working on number 40 when I was doing this. But nothing would have changed. It would have been a little pressure, it’s true.“
UploadVR: “You said it’s the most animated course you guys have had. Did that extend the production time at all, or because this course was a bit simpler, did that time just get filled with the animation and it kind of balanced out?“
Henning: “The minimalism of the animation and the fact that I could just do it ended up being a boon for timing. I just knew what the characters were going to do and imagining all through the design process. And I come from animation, that was my job before Mighty Coconut, so the fact that I could just jump in and do it and not pass it around as a task for someone else saved us time.“
Lucas: “I will also say that all of the timing on things goes back to the question you just asked a second ago about how we choose courses and the order that they come out in. Because we will often set the schedule not just by the tones, but also certain courses lean more heavily on certain departments. So if there’s one course that is extremely animation heavy, we won’t tend to put two of those back-to-back because that means that the person or two that are animating are going to be just overtasked a little bit.
Similarly, if there’s something that is an extremely art heavy or extremely tech heavy course, the schedule on one doesn’t… it’s not like every single course has the exact same amount of time from every department allotted. And one of the other things that we say a lot internally is that we are not out to make every single course the best at every single thing. It’s way better to pick the two or three things about this course that we want to be absolutely amazing and the best that we have ever done, and in this case I would say it’s probably the design and the animation and how alive the course is.
So by focusing on those two things, then it wasn’t as involved from a technical standpoint. So it’s still doing some amazing things that we haven’t done before, but it’s not trying to do every single thing better than we’ve ever done it before because you just can’t, and that’s how you tend to get a lot of courses that feel the same because you’re just trying to strike the same notes every single time.“
UploadVR: That makes perfect sense. All right, last question, this is for each of you in turn. We’ll start with Henning. Name one thing that you would like players to, like just point out to players as they’re playing the course. Could be something small, could be like a specific hole, just name one thing you’re saying, hey guys, look out for this.
Henning: Look out for the callback to the rideable whale out in the Santorini bay.
UploadVR: Okay. All right, Lucas?
Lucas: I will go really nerdy. I want everyone to fly around and like just, I love the water and the, the transparency that we get with that. So if you fly up to the top, check that out because it’s really, really cool to see how this blocky sort of village rises up out of this really awesome ocean.
UploadVR: All right. And Chris?
Chris: Yeah, and I’ll just say, I mean, I don’t know if this is, you know, if I’m just coming late to the game with this, but on this course in particular, I feel like every single hole, you know, as I’m playing it, I also want to step back and just look at it and kind of take it all in, you know, from a bird’s-eye view to kind of see the design of it and then, and then kind of go back in to play, play the hole. So I think I took longer to play through my round when I was playing this course because of that, ’cause there’s just so much to appreciate in the design.
UploadVR: “Well gentlemen, thank you very, very much for your time today. Taking the time to do this tour and this interview, I really appreciate it.
Lucas: “Awesome. Thanks Mike.“
Henning: “Thanks Mike.“
Walkabout Mini Golf is available on Steam, PSVR2, Quest, Pico, and Samsung Galaxy XR. Blokhaven is out now on all listed VR platforms for $4.99.
