With over a million downloads, the mobile game Disc Golf Valley is probably the most-played disc golf video game of all time. It started as a hobby project Swede Per Wahlstedt threw together to teach himself programming, but the game saw runaway success during the COVID-19 pandemic that led Wahlstedt to leave a secure job in IT and jump full time into disc golf gaming.
He's currently the lead developer for Spinoff Games. The outfit consists of a small team and is under the House of Discs umbrella along with disc golf equipment brands like Latitude 64°, Dynamic Discs, Discmania, and others. Until recently, the Spinoff crew's sole focus was on expanding and improving Disc Golf Valley.
That changed when they started work on Disc Golf Masters, which they released in a playtest version in May 2025. The nine holes in this early version of the new game have a lot in common with the magical, peaceful courses in Disc Golf Valley, but Disc Golf Masters is far from a carbon copy of the mobile gaming hit.
We talked with Wahlstedt to learn more about what's gone into Disc Golf Masters so far, get answers to early players' common questions (like 'why no forehand?'), and his ongoing journey as a pioneer in disc golf video games.
Building on Disc Golf Valley's Foundations
Like many outdoor pursuits, disc golf experienced a huge uptick in interest during the pandemic, and so did the gaming industry. Disc Golf Valley benefitted from being at the intersection of those two surges, providing an outlet for longtime disc golfers who didn't want to or couldn't leave their homes as well an engaging new e-sport for those getting sick of their normal fare.
Though Wahlstedt said download and play numbers came back down to Earth as life returned to normal, their fall wasn't as precipitous as the drop in demand many disc golf equipment retailers experienced.
"For sure there was a pandemic boom for Disc Golf Valley," Wahlstedt said. "It was also a boom for disc golf in general. The leveling off from that boom has been pretty dramatic for disc golf, but it's been less dramatic for Disc Golf Valley."
Ongoing interest in their first game made developing a second one seem viable to Spinoff. Wahlstedt also welcomed the chance to apply the knowhow he's gained to a new project.
"It's an evolution from Disc Golf Valley for me," Wahlstedt said. "I learned so much while building Disc Golf Valley about how to actually do things. So, in some ways, Masters is like, 'Okay, let's do it right from the start."
Translating disc flight physics into the game realm is one of the areas where Wahlstedt feels much more comfortable nowadays, and Valley has helped the Spinoff team understand how to create a huge range of disc flight paths. Since Masters will run on machines with a lot more processing power than phones, the developers are loving, in Wahlstedt's words, "really getting nerdy" with this aspect of the game.
"The turn and fade factors are from wind tunnel data, which means that when we add new discs and experiment with things like giving the player more power, all of those physical inputs are real values," Wahlstedt explained.
But another skill Spinoff has honed is balancing realism with the desires of players and stakeholders. For instance, disc manufacturers often enjoy seeing their discs fly a bit farther and more accurately in the game world than the physics say they should. Players, for their part, don't want video game baskets to catch like real baskets.
"Spit-outs are just not fun ever," Wahlstedt said. "We've gotten to the point where the baskets catch incredibly well – much, much better than they do in real life."
The Hardest Parts of Creating Disc Golf Masters
The two aspects of Disc Golf Masters that have been the most difficult for Spinoff to develop are also what most set it apart from Disc Golf Valley: 1) an avatar who throws the disc and 2) throw inputs that come from a console controller or mouse.
Why It's Hard to Have an Avatar (and Why It Can't Throw Forehand Yet)
At first, Wahlstedt thought adding a visible player wouldn't take too much work. They'd have a good disc golfer come in, do a few throws while connected to motion capture equipment, and the animation would be pretty simple from there. In practice, making the player's movements feel right was a far more nuanced and time-consuming task than the team had ever dreamed.
"It's such a dynamic motion, a very athletic movement that you're doing when you're making a disc golf throw," Wahlstedt said. "And there are so many variables, so you're always blending. What direction is the player character throwing? Is he throwing up or down or left or right? Is he putting hyzer or anyzer on it? And every single change to those variables changes the movement in subtle ways."
This clip from YouTube shows what a righthanded backhand anhyzer looks like in the playtest version:
The road to reach results like that started with Spinoff contracting someone who had lots of experience in animation but none with disc golf. The lack of sport-specific knowledge was evident in his early attempts.
"He could do a great throw that really looked like someone throwing a Frisbee," Wahlstedt said. "But if you're a disc golfer, and you look at the first versions of that animation, you're like, 'That's not correct at all.' And it's these really small, subtle cues that are so obvious to someone who watches Jomez everyday."
To help move the process forward, a Spinoff crew member who's not an animator but is a disc golfer tried their hand at creating a basic throw animation. Wahlstedt said despite the quality of animation being low, the avatar's motions felt better than anything the experienced animator had achieved until then – thanks entirely to the creator knowing what disc golf motions should look like.
The difficulty of recreating disc golf throws believably in the game is the biggest reason why the playtest version doesn't have run-ups or include an option for forehands. Getting standstill backhands and putts to look right took so much time and effort that the team decided to release the playtest with just those throw options. Forehands are, however, in the works for future releases. Utility throws like tomahawks, thumbers, and turbo putts aren't currently on Spinoff's to-do list.
Getting a Handle on the Controls
Another task that had the Spinoff team scratching their heads for a long time was translating aspects of a disc golf throw to a console controller. Wahlstedt said the touchscreen inputs used in Valley were so intuitive that they've changed little since his first versions of the game. Nothing, though, felt obvious when recreating a disc golf throw with a console controller.
"We probably spent the most time out of anything in this test version just testing different input methods," Wahlstedt said.
After exploring many, many options, Spinoff went with inputs that utilize controllers' two joysticks to control thrower position, height, angle, and power. When players don't have a console controller, they can use a mouse, left-clicking to position the player on the tee and right-clicking to control other aspects of the throw.
After players choose a throw shape, they need to move either the right joystick or right-clicked mouse along a line in the direction of their throw as precisely as possible. Here's an example from the YouTube channel KK Discgolf:
What's to Come for Disc Golf Masters
At this point Spinoff has lined up enough funding for Disc Golf Masters to be, in Wahlstedt's words, "in go mode" for creating a full game. Timelines, though, are still elastic.
When a more finalized version is available, multiplayer options that allow real players to virtually meet up and compete are a priority. The same goes for having a career mode similar to many sports games where players can move up the ranks while competing against simulated competitors.
As those game modes are being developed, Wahlstedt said that along with traditional golf games, he's drawing a lot of inspiration from the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series.
"They were just really successful in capturing a niche sport, not just from the gameplay perspective but from the cultural side – the music, the attitude, the vibes," Wahlstedt said. "And also they were just really well-designed games."
Though it's a long shot that Disc Golf Masters will make a splash anything like the Tony Hawk franchise that saw its first few iterations top video game sales charts in the early 2000s, Wahlstedt has been heartened by the response so far.
"The people with Disc Golf Valley on their phones typically don't play any other games on their phones," said Wahlstedt. "It's not the typical gaming audience, and that's been a concern for us. So I was really happy to see we got a lot of players on the playtest, and that gave us some confidence."
Currently, the Disc Golf Masters playtest is available only for PCs with Windows 10 or later through Steam (no Mac version as of yet), but the company's plan is for later versions to be downloadable on Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
