An example of the development of simple casual games for Windows 8

Casual games

To participate in the competition of applications for Windows 8, I decided to choose casual games as a theme for applications. First, it is always interesting to develop a small game yourself, and secondly, there was simply no time to develop something big. In this article, I briefly want to talk about my first development experience for Windows 8 and share my impressions.

Game ideas

In total, I had conceived 5 games. It was decided to write them in C # + XAML, since I was already familiar with Silverlight (MCP for SL4) and development for Windows Phone 7. So, this is what I decided to implement:

• Flip-flop game (this game was written for WP7)
• A game for the daughter of 2 years, in which you need to guess the shape or color of the figure
• The game in which you need to pick up the "key" for the larva of the castle
• A game in which you need to evaluate how many threads you need to pass by the type of maze
• A game in which you need to quickly place the ball in the correct hole

The ideas of the games were taken partly from what was once seen somewhere (I played flip-flop in the game at the computer science school), or they were invented in between cases.

Little about implementation

In all games, I used a Grid to place elements. For those games where I needed Drag & Drop, I used Canvas. To divide the elements visually by color, I applied the rainbow rule - this is a reliable and proven option. Separately, it is worth noting that all the elements that could be declared in XAML I declared there, but in order to gain control over them, for example, to hide or show, I added these elements to the collection, and later in the cycle I processed them. By the end of the development of the last game, I realized that it was necessary to use animation for any action on objects. Here, by the way, there was a surprise when porting code from WP7: in Windows 8 there is an animation, which is called dependent and should be explicitly declared as such. This type, for example, includes animation of UIElement sizes. Another good rule - the game starts to look much more attractive if you adjust the gradients and transparency of visual elements. There was another surprise waiting for me: for some reason, there was no place among the available brushes for RadialGradientBrush. Therefore, the balls I have turned out flat. I haven’t yet localized the applications to English, I decided to do it in the next update. In general, the development for Windows 8 is very pleasant, Visual Studio 2012 behaved well. I stored the project in cloud TFS on tfspreview.com .

Simultaneous development for win8 and wp7

Porting the game from WP7 to Windows 8 and in the opposite direction is fairly easy if you do not use local storage in your phone on Linq2sql. Windows 8 has gone even further towards the consumption of content, so creating an application from a local database to SQL CE will no longer work. On the other hand, in Windows 8 there is a closer integration with the Microsoft cloud, which allows, for example, transfer settings between devices in a transparent way.

The most obvious problem when porting applications is the problem of screen size mismatch. Everything is very compact on the phone, and in Windows 8 there is too much free space. On the other hand, XAML quite flexibly allows you to customize the interface to work in different resolutions.

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Windows store

Certification terms of applications before the release of Windows 8, of course increased. My first application was tested in 7 days (as it is written in the dashboard), the fifth was checked for 11 days. Publishing in the store is carried out almost immediately after verification, unlike WP7 applications, which become available only 24 hours after certification. WP7-application, by the way, checked for 14 days.

Links to applications

Here is a list of applications that I developed. They are all free.

1. SimSimGame (flip-flop)

apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-RU/app/simsimgame/4d404c1d-b360-45eb-bd3b-d54342835b6e

2. Match4Kids (choose the correct figure)

Windows 8: apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-US/app/match4kids/ea9772aa-33cf-4144-9aa6-5c08feddc4cc

WP7: www.windowsphone.com/ru-ru/store/app/match4kids/10ef27b9-3fe1-493d-82ed-7f89fc4bbd84

3. Keyhole (pick up the key for the lock)

apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-RU/app/keyhole/7d45ed87-3618-4216-93a5-18b7e9c1aa2b

4. Thread4Maze (maze thread)

apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-RU/app/thread4maze/b5ba4f9a-0a38-4fd0-9b02-486cb9c5f545

5. Balls2Holes (moving balls at speed)

apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-RU/app/balls2holes/76c8f7e0-cc9f-4e87-b06d-a9f88e72c930

I’ll be happy to hear constructive criticism and try to refine the applications to make them better.