The design team behind Walkabout Mini Golf occasionally leaves their homes to gather for a retreat in the physical world.Funded by sales of the VR game and its add-on destinations, like the newly released Tokyo, Walkabout's originator Lucas Martell occasionally brings together Don Carson, Laura Krause, and Henning Koczy. These retreats are usually held somewhere beautiful, with dinners or hikes on the schedule. They also involve a grueling amount of time wearing Quest headsets in the gray mess of Gravity Sketch.That’s where they build new mini golf courses. Dropping hole markers one by one, from 1 to 18, they make a yellow line charting their plan for the Walkabout path. Passport Tokyo started in one of those retreats, before Krause joined Mighty Coconut last year, but its release today informally marks the beginning of her contributions to the team even as Walkabout's creators work on courses that won’t open in VR until 2027. Bottom line? If you visit a capybara in Passport Tokyo, you have Krause to thank.“When I started on the tea room and onsen, I felt like I had figured out the important bits but they were definitely missing something,” Krause wrote to UploadVR. “I remember I was cooking dinner after staring at hours of Tokyo research when it dawned on me... Capybaras! Not only are there animal cafes around Tokyo, but the zoo where capybaras bathe with yuzu fruit is just a short train ride from the city. They felt like the perfect fit to unify those two areas while making them much more playful and more Walkabout.”The Walkabout Mini Golf ProcessThe Walkabout design team slowly molds those graybox sketches into destinations with surprising attractions sprinkled throughout. They do it a bit like chefs in the kitchen, handing the courses to one another for a pass lasting days or weeks at a time. Sometimes it takes 18 months to fully bake and serve a Walkabout Mini Golf course.So that's how, amid the city streets and old town areas of Tokyo, visitors might find themselves suddenly transfixed by sights and sounds that surprise around every corner. That includes purring cats, bathing capybaras, the clinking of wind chimes, and an entryway with interactive fabric draped across the path.Emma Mercado is one of the 3D artists who define a lot of the decorations seen across Walkabout's courses. They call it “set dec,” and she pulls from a library of hundreds of objects or creates new ones to make scenes that tell mini-stories, helping create a lived-in feel across both the day and night modes of each course.Martell, Mercado, and Carson joined me in Passport Tokyo ahead of its launch to walk through their design process. Martell confirmed they've got at least one more Passport destination planned for the release calendar, and the next design retreat is coming up in a couple of months to sketch out the next set of ideas.In 2022, I toured Walkabout's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea with the course marking the informal start of Carson's contributions. Carson joined just as the studio started revealing surprising partnerships for destinations, like Myst and Labyrinth. In 2025, the game's recent run of courses includes Viva Las Elvis, Crystal Lair and Raptor Cliff's marking an increase in colorful signage and surprising technical features injected into these environments. 0:00 /1:11 1× With no outside investment propping up Mighty Coconut, Martell's work assembling this art team and building out a process with them remains a core focus of coverage at UploadVR. You can visit Walkabout from all major VR headsets and iOS as well.Tour through Passport Tokyo in the video above with Martell, Carson, and Mercado offering behind-the-scenes commentary detailing the Walkabout design process.