Building HTML5 Games with ImpactJS

Chapter 9. Publishing to Windows 8

In the previous chapter I discussed some standard ways to publish an Impact game, such as to the Web and even iOS. In this chapter I want to talk about how to get your Impact game to run on Windows 8. Windows 8 is a brand new version of Windows geared towards tablets and traditional desktops/laptops. One of the key benefits of making games on Windows 8 is the ability to take advantage of HTML and JavaScript. Not only that, but Windows 8 JavaScript games run at almost native speeds. In this chapter we’ll go through how to port Resident Raver over to Windows 8.

Getting Started

Let’s look at how to take our existing game and get it up and running on Windows 8. Before we do that, you are going to need the following things:

• A copy of Windows 8 installed on your computer.

• Visual Studio – You can use either the free copy of Visual Studio Express or one of the paid versions, such as Visual Studio Pro, Ultimate, etc.

• A touch screen – This is not necessary but helpful for testing.

After you have Visual Studio installed and all of the source code from the book ready, you will need to create a new project.

Figure 9-1. Creating a new project in Visual Studio

Once you have the new project set up, copy over lib, media, index.html and weltmeister.html to the VS project folder. We actually don’t need the tools directory since we will not be “baking” the game when we publish ...