Book Image

Learning Windows 8 Game Development

By : Michael Quandt
Book Image

Learning Windows 8 Game Development

By: Michael Quandt

Overview of this book

With the recent success of a lot of smaller games, game development is quickly becoming a great field to get in to. Mobile and PC games are on the rise, and having a way to create a game for all types of devices without rewriting everything is a huge benefit for the new Windows 8 operating system. In this book, you will learn how to use cutting-edge technologies like DirectX and tools that will make creating a game easy. This book also allows you to make money by selling your games to the world. Learning Windows 8 Game Development teaches you how to create exciting games for tablets and PC on the Windows 8 platform. Make a game, learn the techniques, and use them to make the games you want to play. Learn about graphics, multiplayer options, how to use the Proximity + Socket APIs to add local multiplayer, how to sell the game outright, and In-App Purchases. 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. From there, you'll look at how to add awesome features to your game like networking, motion controls, and even take advantage of new Windows 8 features like live tiles and sharing to make your players want to challenge their friends and keep playing. This book wraps up by covering the only way a good game can finish development: by shipping the game on the Windows Store. You'll look at the things to remember to make certification painless and some great tips on how to market and sell your game to the public.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Windows 8 Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

A better menu system


In this section we will look at the changes that need to be made to move from basic text support to a slightly more advanced user interface system that we will need for the game, as well as the basic setup so we can focus on networking later on. If you want to jump to the networking part of this chapter, feel free to skip this section. Here we'll look at one kind of implementation that you could use.

Right now we just have a way to display text using some TextBlock objects that we can add to the renderer; however, even just switching between the score display and the game over message requires a bit of coding work to remove and add the text blocks one-by-one, as well as store their state individually. To get around this we're going to create a menu object that can store the state of the menu and allow us to easily construct and change menus. For the purposes of the sample we only need text functionality; however, this can also let you display textures for the different...