Churning out games for Microsoft's Windows 8 Marketplace

If you have been following the blogs, our company, Sylien Games, has been producing in a serial way games for Windows 8 with the direct help of the excellent people at Microsoft.

Its been so far a challenging but fun ride.

So far we have 6 games out on the Windows 8 marketplace, and we're putting 3 new games on it every day (providing they pass the Microsoft cerfication process).

Akron Online

Akron was one of the first.  Its a game designed by a man in the US called Cameron Browne.  This is the basic game playout for each one of the games really.  A board, some tools to play versus an opponent (casually or competitively), a chat and a history of moves so you can backtrack and see what you did (or revert to a previous position if both players agree).

Due to the serial aspect of the  project, all games look alike but the strategies needed to win are very different from one another.

The idea with Microsoft was to show how easy it was to produce HTML5 games fast for Windows 8, and for sure, we're doing just that.  Currently, since the Windows 8 shell is done, we're publishing 3 new games per day using 2 artists and 1.5 programmers only.  And that's because one of the programmers is working on a shell for the Windows 8 Phone (which needs to be different due to screen dimentions/UI considerations and the fact that the Phone SDK is NOT HTML5 native... compared to the Windows 8 SDK.

Chess Masters Online (Hub portion)

We did spend about 6 weeks producing the first shell with 2 programmers though.  Also, learning the SDKs, circumventing issues with our own engine technology, networking issues, communications issues, interfacing with Microsoft online accounts and contractual obligations etc....  But all in all, since Microsoft personnel were available to us as well as LOTS of good online information (some would say too much of it).

Now for the readers that wish to consider making a game for Windows 8 like this may think its going to be a breeze.  Wait a minute, its not difficult but its not trivial either.  Remember that we already had the 100 games to be ported onto the two platforms running on another site off a game engine already so we didn't have to code any of the logic, just the front end and UI elements for the shell.

You can see from the Chess Masters Online hub picture above that the system we have supports the creation of new games and waiting for an opponent to essentially sit down with you at your board and start playing... and you can also join an existing game and see how another game is going, and even check out a Finished game to see how it worked out, look at the moves made etc...  This was already present in our original engine.  You can also see at the bottom right the other games for Windows 8 being added (up to the 100, with a scrollbar). 

Talpa Online (being Challenged)

If you look at this Talpa game panel, you'll notice how the game also engages players to challenge one another.  This was a feature we added during the build on the client side that was not present in the original engine build.  Since all of our games are primarily player verus player games, mechanisms like these are quite important to keep players engaged while the app is active.

Ultimately, the goal will be to pick out the games that perform best in the Windows 8 store and improve on the model, deepend the experience, use more of the Windows 8 tools to connect with users, like the Tiles, more Notifications (different types are available), Tournament modules (we have one on the server we could use pretty simply) etc...

But of course, I'll keep that for another post.  :)

Here are the links to the games shown above.  Don't worry, if you want to see the others, simply go to the game's hub (at entrance) and choose any one of the games that populate the bottom right corner to get to the proper Marketplace link for the game.

Link to the games in the Win 8 store to check them out and play:

Chess Masters Online

Talpa Online

Akron Online

 

When we get more games out there and finished with the Windows 8 Phone shell, I'll likely write something more so stay tuned!

 

Sylvain