u/lebortsdm

Been going back and forth on this for a while. My logic is if my approach shots were better than I’d have easier chips and putts versus grinding on chipping and putting to bail out my bad approaches. But then I wonder am I avoiding the harder skill to practice?

Anyone actually track this in their own game? Curious if fixing my approach will really cut down on short game workload.

Built this a while back.

It's a browser golf management sim, Basketball GM but golf. Life happened, I stopped touching it. Checked the analytics this week out of curiosity: 282 users in the last 10 days, ~9.6% coming back. They just found it and kept playing.

No backend, just Next.js + LocalStorage. Free. Would love feedback. Link in comments.

Most GM games are built around team sports where you're managing a roster and everyone else on the team fills in the gaps. Golf breaks that model completely. There's no roster, no lineup decisions, no trades. It's just one golfer and a season full of individual tournaments.

I ended up leaning hard into career arc and form as the core management layers instead of roster building. You're not managing a team, you're managing a career: training decisions, tournament selection, energy management across a season, and long term trajectory (rising star, peak performer, veteran grinder, fading legend, that kind of thing).

Curious how other people here think about GM games for individual sports. Is roster management actually the thing that makes these games addictive, or is career progression enough to carry it on its own?

Built the thing and posted a link in the comments if you want to try it out.

Built a golf career sim as a side project, inspired by Basketball GM. Got a decent spike right around New Year's, then it did what these things do and dropped off fast. I basically walked away after that. Didn't open the codebase again for months.

This week, for no real reason, I went back in to actually look at the numbers instead of just wondering about them. Found roughly 6,700 people had played since that original spike, without me touching anything. About 1,300 of them finished a full season at some point, off season through playoffs. That number surprised me, genuinely didn't expect anyone to still be finding it.

Also found some embarrassing stuff sitting there untouched: the demo's been showing the wrong season year this whole time, there's an achievement-sharing feature basically nobody's used, a whole page almost nobody's found because I never linked it anywhere.

Started fixing what I found this week. Posted an honest update on r/golf about it too, wasn't expecting much and people actually showed up.

Not sure what the lesson is here exactly. Maybe that a project can keep quietly working even when you've stopped touching it. Or that checking your own numbers occasionally is worth doing.

Anyway, back to actually building this now. Curious if anyone else here has had a project just sit there and keep getting used after they walked away from it.

Link in the comments if anyone wants to try.

Either I’m playing the wrong servers or just terrible at the game. Pretty experienced with the game but I feel like I always run into someone better than me. If you’re anything like me, how do you deal with struggling with the game even when you have a ton of hours?