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Make a game, learn the techniques, and use them to make the games you want to play. Learning Windows 8 Game Development guides you from the start of your journey all the way to developing games for Windows by showing you how to develop a game from scratch and sell it in the store.
With Learning Windows 8 Game Development, you will learn how to write the code required to set everything up, get some graphics on screen, and then jump into the fun part of adding gameplay to turn a graphics sample into a proper game. This book wraps up by covering the only way a good game can finish development: Sign up to our emails for regular updates, bespoke offers, exclusive discounts and great free content.
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Windows 8 brings touchscreens to the tablet and PC. This book will show you how to develop games for both by following clear, hands-on examples. Are you sure you want to claim this product using a token? Michael Quandt October What do I get with a Packt subscription? What do I get with an eBook? What do I get with a Video? Learn more Add to cart.
Book Description With the recent success of a lot of smaller games, game development is quickly becoming a great field to get in to. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Getting Started with Direct3D. Adding the Play in the Gameplay.
Playing Games with Friends. Main game controls should be easily accessible and secondary controls should be tucked away in an app bar or in a settings panel until they are needed. After all, game developers have been providing fast and fluid, full screen, immersive experiences for a long time. Nevertheless, several basic questions arise almost right away:.
Game developers have been using a wide range of technologies to deliver entertaining games to the PC community for a long time. The APIs used on Windows have evolved significantly over time. With Windows 8, a new development platform has been added. The Windows Runtime API aggregates the best technologies from APIs of the past and brings significant improvements in performance, security, development consistency and servicing. The Windows Store adds a new way for games to be discovered, distributed and serviced. These new APIs significantly add value for game developers targeting the new development model.
You might have some questions when you start to develop a Windows Store game, for example:. Every game starts with an idea. Where that idea comes from can be very different. Other times, a more collaborative and iterative approach with your team may result in the idea. Maybe you want a new unique game. Or perhaps you want to port your existing game. The Windows 8 game category design guidance gives you some ideas about how best to attract players and keep them engaged with tiles and notifications.
There are also suggestions about what type of overall layout to use and where to place primary and secondary controls. You can find recommendations about interactions and how to incorporate touch, sensors and contracts into your game. Decisions about game mechanics and controls should be made as early as possible to scope development.
Windows 8 brings touchscreens to the tablet and PC. This book will show you how to develop games for both by following clear, hands-on examples. Takes your. Learning Windows 8 Game Development [Michael Quandt] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com * FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Windows 8 brings touchscreens to the tablet .
Too slow and they may lose interest; too fast and they may get frustrated. The Windows Store allows you to choose your business model.
Windows Store games can take advantage of the built-in time-based or feature-based trials. Alternately, you can use a third-party commerce provider or roll your own. Like all Windows Store apps, games have to support the different activation, view and suspension states. Decide how your game will support landscape and portrait orientations.
A high contrast mode and extra audio queues could help increase visibility or playability and therefore encourage adoption among players in less than ideal lighting conditions or with visual impairments.
Game publishing requirements provides Windows 8 game developers with info about the tools and support for common game publishing scenarios, such as ratings certification and packaging. Register for an account and access leading-edge content on emerging technologies. How do the development models map to the different game genres? Alternately, you can use a third-party commerce provider or roll your own. Supporting screen orientation , covers screen rotation and DPI scaling of content and input for DirectX applications.
DirectX is considered to be at the heart of the Windows game development platform. However, many other components were developed and transitioned in to the Windows 8 SDK to provide all the required capabilities the platform needs to support the diverse Windows gaming ecosystem. We provide a consistent and comprehensive development approach. We also incorporated best practices learned from other game development platforms. More than anything, however, we emphasized and observed two key architectural goals.
Performance and power consumption were at the core of every architectural decision — as described in the Hardware Accelerating Everything: Windows 8 Graphics blog post.
Developing games on Windows 8 rocks because the entire platform was designed to deliver fast and fluid entertainment experiences. The Windows Runtime provides a rich set of APIs that expose all the new devices and sensors in a convenient, consistent way, and simplifies Windows event handling. This is the easiest version of DirectX to develop with, and it supports a wide range of graphics feature levels, from DirectX 9. Managed code developers can build great, smooth 2D games with XAML that leverage the strength and features of the Windows Store platform.
The Windows 8 game development components and libraries. Lower level components offer more flexibility, resource management and performance but may require additional code to comprehensively control processing and the flow of data it requires. For 3D and 2D graphics, media, imaging and many of the other gaming components — the Windows 8 DirectX technologies provide a comprehensive set of APIs, components and libraries to build upon.
Check out Getting started with DirectX game development for a comprehensive overview. The new Windows 8 graphics stack is better integrated, making Direct2D, Direct3D, DirectVideo and DirectCompute components easier to use together and requiring fewer duplicated resources than before. To learn more about it see Working with Input and controls in your DirectX game.
The improved APIs for audio and sound mixing with XAudio2 are covered in the Working with audio in your DirectX game section, and simplified math functions and types are covered in the DirectXMath programming guide.
There are several additional development models available in Windows 8. We provide a great set of tools to meet the demands of Windows Store game developers. The template code provides the basic view provider infrastructure and window support, and references to all the necessary headers and components. There are other templates to explore that will make sure you are using best practices no matter which game development model you choose. Additionally, new features in Visual Studio have been added to improve game development, debugging and profiling. Investments in Visual Studio Graphics Tools were made to ensure that graphics application development is seamlessly integrated.
These samples provide a great range of source code examples to get you started on your game development quickly.
Each sample focuses on a particular technology or technique. The tutorials and samples were developed with a progression in mind. They are in logical order beginning with the sparsest amount of code and simplest approach to help you get started. Each additional sample adds to the previous sample with one or two additional concepts until an entire game is created. Several development patterns, best practices and techniques that are particularly relevant to game development are worth pointing out:.
Developing high quality professional games can be costly. Developing games for multiple platforms can be complex, error prone, and even more costly. Rendering engines, user interface tool kits, visibility occlusion, physics simulators, audio video authoring, animation interpolation and artificial intelligence are just a few of the technology categories typically involved in game development.
Some gaming technologies can take many years to develop and fine-tune. Proprietary gaming pipelines are incredibly valuable and many studios consider their investments as strategic as the games they make.
Not everyone can afford the time or cost of developing a pipeline however. Luckily, third-party vendors offer end-to-end game development pipelines or individual technology libraries that provide these capabilities. Since Windows 8 launched, many gaming middleware vendors have transitioned their offerings to the new Windows Store app model. Using these products will get your game in the Windows Store much faster and with much less risk. As time progresses, we expect more vendors to announce and ship products for Windows Store game development.
The following in alphabetical order is a compilation of third-party gaming middleware vendors that at the time of writing have announced or delivered versions of their product that support Windows 8 game development. Alternatively, we have seen developers successfully use the open source MonoGame library that replicates many of the XNA Game Studio capabilities. Several articles have been written about leveraging assets created with XNA for games targeting the Windows Store.
Windows 8 reimagines PCs and with new form factors, innovative technologies and lucrative commerce models that are perfect for gaming. The platform represents a green-field of opportunity for those who take advantage of it. The Windows Store has several thousand games at the time of writing and that number grows daily. The goal of this post was to help you understand what it would take to create a great Windows Store game of your own to leverage the possibilities.
The information was meant to clarify how Windows 8 can make game development easier, more creative, innovative and profitable. As we head out to the annual Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, look to this post for guidance as you develop Windows Store games. You must be logged in to post a comment. As you're talking about accessibility for various impairments, this site might be useful for your 'Additional resources for developing games' section — http: Why are you trying to discourage us from using C?
Why are you depreciating that?