Fire in the Hole

First Build

Fire in the Hole is a 2 - 4 player couch co-op twin stick shooter, where players must compete against each other in a Golf arena, competing to Golf the most golf balls while fighting each other off with different guns in intense top down combat. Players use whatever weapons, unique power ups, and wacky types of Golf balls like the Bomb Ball, Scatterball, Walking Ball and more to get an edge on their enemies.

I personally:

• Designed main gameplay mechanics and programmed them throughout development

• Designed and programmed our golfing mechanics & golf physics

• Designed and programmed the power up mechanics

• Designed and programmed the special golf ball type mechanics

• Designed our gameplay loop with another designer

• Weekly Iterative playtesting on WIP mechanics

• Designed our scoring system to align with player motivations

• Created and implemented shaders

Developed by Fairway Slugs, a small 6 person Indie team, I took on a lot of responsibilities and had a big hand in a lot of the in game mechanics and moment to moment gameplay design. Programmed entirely in Unity C#, Fire in the Hole has been in development starting September 2024, where I had taken on the role of Gameplay and Mechanics designer, and one of our main programmers. I personally saw many features and mechanics in this game from my initial design documents to final build implementation. With week long sprints, I have been able to adapt my designs to fit within scope, fully aware of the possibilities and limits of the engine and my knowledge as a programmer, so nothing that was designed was overly ambitious, which led to us having a great milestone schedule. I carry that attitude throughout all of my designs “I wont design what I cant program”.

From early on in development, I learnt that we had a hard time sharing the same vision during our meetings, so I used my art skills to better adapt my design documents to use more visuals and art to better convey the ideas of the design and proposed plans, which had a great impact on keeping our shared vision alive.

In April 2025, we took our build and presented it to 1000’s of people at the Toronto LevelUp showcase event!

Fire in the Hole is officially on Steam! Find it below!

Or download an earlier build from our Itch.io page here!