Why Career Mode Moved to Its Own Subdomain

If you played the original Rainy Day Golf, the new homepage probably looks like a completely different game.

That is because it basically is.

The old version was built around a career. You created a golfer, played tournaments, trained different parts of your game, and tried to improve over multiple seasons.

The new version is built around daily golf games that take a few minutes.

Career Mode still exists. It just lives at game.rainydaygc.com now.

Moving it there was partly about organizing the site, but mostly about making Rainy Day Golf easier to understand.

The homepage was trying to explain two different games

Career Mode asks for some time.

Even after I added Quick Start, the point of the game was still to create a golfer, learn the systems, play tournaments, and see what happened over a longer career.

The daily games ask for something different.

Here is today's golf problem. Make a few decisions, get a score, and be done in a couple minutes.

Both of those can be fun, but they are not the same pitch.

Trying to put them behind one giant Play button would have made the first decision happen before anybody had even played anything.

Do you want the quick game or the long game? A puzzle or a simulation? Something for today or something you might keep playing for weeks?

That felt like a bad way to introduce the site.

The main Rainy Day Golf site needed to say one clear thing.

Your daily round of golf. A few minutes. One golf challenge.

Career Mode needed a place where it could keep being Career Mode without making that message harder to understand.

The old game taught me to get to the fun faster

The original Career setup took about five minutes before you could play a tournament.

People hated that.

I added Quick Start, got the setup down to around 30 seconds, and usage jumped. That was the first big clue that people clicking a browser golf game were not going to give me much time to explain why it might eventually be fun.

Then I looked at the analytics and saw that around 72–80% of players were on their phones.

I had built a long career management game at my desk while most people were opening it on a small screen.

That did not make Career Mode a bad idea. Some people played a lot of it.

But it made me want a front door that worked for the person who had two minutes, had never heard of Rainy Day Golf, and just wanted to try something.

That is what the daily games are for.

A separate home is better than pretending Career disappeared

I could have replaced the old game and acted like the new version was simply Rainy Day Golf 2.

I didn't want to do that.

People had played thousands of tournament rounds in Career Mode. They had given me feedback, found bugs, and in some cases played through years of a golfer's career.

The game still worked. More importantly, it still offered something the daily games did not.

So instead of forcing the two formats together, I gave them separate homes.

The main site is where the daily games, Clubhouse, and the new turn-based Tour live.

The game subdomain is where the original long-form Career Mode lives.

That separation also lets me be more honest about what I am actively building. Most of my attention right now is going toward smaller golf games, quicker decisions, and things that can change every day.

Career Mode is still available without pretending it is the center of the new site.

This was a product decision disguised as a URL change

Subdomains are not very interesting.

Nobody has ever finished a round of golf and said the best part was the website architecture.

But the move mattered because it forced me to decide what each part of Rainy Day Golf was actually for.

If you want to create a golfer and build a career, that game has a home.

If you want one golf challenge today, the main site has a clear place to start.

The harder part was moving everything without breaking it.

I did break some of it.

That is probably the next post.