Cornhole Pro is now officially available for download on the App Store! It’s our first game, so please support us by checking it out (it’s only $0.99). It’s compatible with the iPhone and second-generation iPod touch.

If you like it, please rate it, leave a review, or tell your friends. Thanks for your support. Download Cornhole Pro here!

Today I’m proud to announce our first game for the iPhone and iPod touch: Cornhole Pro. It’s not available on the App Store yet (waiting on approval), but I’ll let you know as soon as it’s out there. Want to know more? You’re in luck:

Enjoy a game of cornhole in a realistic 3D environment

About Cornhole Pro

Cornhole Pro lets you enjoy all the fun of cornhole from the comfort of your iPhone (perfect for rainy days and bars that really should have a cornhole set). Cornhole Pro features:

• Realistic bag-throwing physics
• A 3D playing field
• Shifting wind for added challenge
• A practice mode for honing your skills (perfect for hustling friends)
• Support for two or four players (all players use the same device)
• Variable game length: play to 10, 21 or 50 points!
• The ability to stop a game and resume later (in case you just have to take that call)

Why should you buy Cornhole Pro? It’s the closest you’ll get to the real thing on a mobile device. Other cornhole games for the iPhone just simulate the game in 2D. Cornhole Pro’s realistic physics and 3D playing field give you all you’d expect from a live cornhole match.

What is Cornhole?

Here in the southern U.S., tailgating is a time-honored tradition. For the uninitiated, tailgating involves gathering in the parking lot of a sporting event or concert to eat, drink, and play all manner of simple games, the best of which can be enjoyed with a cold beverage in one hand.

In our opinion, the best among them is cornhole, which requires players to throw a cloth bag (usually filled with cracked corn) at a hole in a wooden platform about 20 feet away. Land a bag on the platform, get one point. Throw a bag in the hole, get three points. That’s it. Actually, it’s kind of like horseshoes, just without the danger. Check out the American Cornhole Association for more.

In a few free moments the other day I implemented some much-needed improvements to SPUDZOOKA. There aren’t any new levels yet, but I did make some changes several people had requested:

• I made the second level easier. It’s a sign that you didn’t do enough testing when people repeatedly tell you they can’t get past the second level. Mostly it was people who don’t play games very often, but in a casual game they’re the ones to accommodate.
• I added a counter that tracks how many targets you’ve hit and how many are required to beat the level. This helps people track their progress and gives a better sense of how urgent things are as time ticks away.
• I fixed a bug where the money you earned at the end of the last level wasn’t being added to your total. This meant you couldn’t buy anymore cannon parts after playing through once.
• I also added some bonus money to your total when you beat the final level. Now when you enter free play you should have enough money to buy any remaining components and customize your cannon any way you like.

So if you’re a SPUDZOOKA fan but haven’t played in a while, go back and check out the new enhancements!

I still find it difficult to call SPUDZOOKA finished. There are still so many things that would make it better. More levels, more cannon parts and paint jobs, more things to shoot at, a new environment to play in (something other than a warehouse) — all would help. I even planned to build a level editor at one point.

But, as I’ve said before, SPUDZOOKA was never supposed to be more than a learning experience. What did I learn, you ask? Did any life lessons stick in my head? Here are a few:

Programming is the easy part
Yes, it’s essential. Interaction (gameplay) is what makes games tick, and programming makes gameplay possible. There’s no denying its importance. But I learned that it’s much more difficult to create compelling visuals than compelling gameplay. Gameplay either works or it doesn’t. There are levels of quality in there, certainly, but once you’ve got your central game mechanic humming along, you’re done with the bulk of the work. Everything else is details.

The visuals, though, can go on forever. You’ve got to model dozens of objects, texture them, and possibly animate them. The process is endless, and it’s made even more nerve-wracking by the fact that it’s always possible to make something look better. I could have spent weeks trying to create the perfect cardboard box, giving it so much character that you would gasp at seeing it for the first time. But I found that the “good enough” threshold for modeling and texturing comes fairly early in the process for me. Partly I was frustrated my lack of knowledge. I don’t know the right tricks to make things look perfect, and I found my patience was limited for experimentation. So I generally created something that was close enough and went with it.

Maybe this means I’m not a natural-born modeler/texturer. Or that I should have been a programmer.

Self-promotion is a tricky game
I loved building the web site for SPUDZOOKA. In my day job I work on a large, convoluted corporate web site. It was fun to create something very simple from scratch. But now that it’s there, how do I get people to see it? I can blog about it endlessly, be sure the site shows up on Google searches, submit it to game publishers like shockwave.com (we’ll see if they respond), post about it on the Unity forum, and post something about it on Facebook. I’ve done all of the above, and I even added an e-mail-a-friend feature to the page where you play the game. But there’s a critical mass to these things, and I haven’t hit it yet. It’s been an interesting test. I’ll keep plugging away, but I’ve learned that it’s a full-time job to promote something like this using the grass-roots tools of the Web.

If a target-shooting game takes four months…
How long will it take to create an RPG with memorable characters, a sweeping story, and a vast world to explore? This is the big one. It will take (more) years, and a lot of dedication to make it happen. I might be better off focusing on a series of smaller projects and putting the big project aside indefinitely. Or I could figure out a way to divide the big project into smaller ones. Maybe there’s another kind of story I can tell that won’t be so ridiculously large. Instead of aiming right an an epic, perhaps I should start with a short story.

Regardless of what I decide, I have to decide on something. I’ll probably spend the next week or two mulling the possibilities and see what develops. SPUDZOOKA is the first step. Now I have to take the next.

Yes, at long last, SPUDZOOKA is live and ready to play. You’re excitement is intense, I can tell.

I made a few visual enhancements since the beta version, and I fixed a number of bugs, including one irritating one that would randomly cause people’s browsers to crash (never a good thing for web-based game).

There’s also a web site where you can learn a little about the tools I used to create the game and leave comments letting me know what you think.

Oh, and one more thing: there’s a little surprise for people who play all the way through the levels. It was a much-requested feature. I hope you enjoy it. Ok, enough jibber-jabber. Go play SPUDZOOKA!