Neverputt

About the game

Neverputt is the mini golf game that ships with Neverball. It uses the same 3D engine and the same physics, but here you do touch the ball: you line up each putt, choose how hard to hit it and watch it roll across greens that float in the sky.

There are nine courses and 170 holes. The original 18-hole course by Robert Kooima starts gently, and the others were built by players of the game: Pasi Kallinen alone made three 18-hole courses and a 26-hole course with one hole per letter of the alphabet. The later courses add ramps, tubes, corkscrews, teleporters, moving platforms and switches, and the hardest one, Tricky Golf, describes its own difficulty as "Expert through Insane".

Up to four people can play on the same computer, taking turns at the same hole. The score card counts strokes against the par of each hole.

Playing it here

This is Neverputt 1.6.0, compiled for the browser by FredyGames from the Neverball project's source code, because the project only publishes a browser version of Neverball. The download is about 29 MB and the game plays offline once it has loaded. Your settings stay in this browser. The game is in English.

Click inside the game when you are putting: the mouse is captured while you aim, and Esc releases it and pauses.

Controls

Getting started

Pick a course and the number of players. Play opens the list of courses, with a picture and a short description of each. The first one, the original Neverputt course, is the best place to learn.

Watch the flyover. Before each hole the camera shows you the whole layout from the tee to the flag. It is worth seeing where the walls, slopes and traps are before you aim.

Aim, then choose the strength. The arrow on the ball shows the direction and grows with the strength. Moving the mouse up adds power, moving it down takes it away.

Tips

Less is more. Most putts need far less power than it seems. A ball that leaves the course comes back to where you hit it from, with a one-stroke penalty.

Use the walls. Bouncing off a wall is often the only way around a corner, and the bounce is predictable: the ball leaves at the same angle it arrives.

Watch the moving parts. Moving platforms run on a fixed cycle. Wait for the right moment instead of hitting harder.

Know the limit. A hole stops counting at 12 strokes (par plus 3 on the rare holes with a par above 9), so one bad hole never ruins the whole round.

Credits and licence

Neverputt was created by Robert Kooima, and the courses were made by Robert Kooima, Pasi Kallinen, Michael Middleton, Byron James Johnson, vidski and Reshaun Francis. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. The licence text and the complete source code of this build are linked from this page.