Re:Ask HN: My game was just featured in the Windows 8 app st...
by aschearer on Sunday March 03, 2013 @06:31PM
(#5315686)
I used MonoGame for Adlib and Petunk. For Windows 8 and Windows 7 the games share almost all of their code. I would estimate 90%. The only differences are persistence, sharing, that sort of thing. That said, it gets trickier when you want to create complex user interfaces or support different resolutions. In fact for my latest game I've switched to XAML completely due to those problems.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is to follow the MVC or MVVM (my preference) pattern and keep all of your game logic in a portable class library. This will give you the flexibility to target new platforms relatively quickly in my experience.
I've made a number of solutions to common problems I ran into which run on Windows 8 and 7 (and potentially other platforms) available if you're interested. Check it out here:
I've recently began rewriting our framework to Mono / C# and so far it's been a good experience. From what I've read I should be able to have at least 50% shared code across platforms, but some type of apps can perform even better. Games written with MonoGame (open-source version of Microsoft's XNA framework) might be able to share over 90% of the code between iOS / Android / Windows Phone apps. Also the Ubuntu phone will be a possible target in the coming year.
So yeah, I agree Windows is an interesting target, but you don't want to miss out on the other markets. Mono is the best solution to have a performant app for most platforms while at the same time offering a native UI experience.