Releasing HTML5 Games for Windows 8

Chapter 8. Back to the Web

In this chapter we will discuss techniques for making sure your HTML5 game will still run on the Web as well as Windows 8. After spending all of this time getting your game to run on Windows 8, it’s important to make sure you can also get the most out of your hard work and take advantage of the ability to run HTML5 games on multiple platforms.

A Web-First Workflow

Throughout this book we focused solely on getting an exciting HTML5 game to run on Windows 8 inside of Visual Studio. While this is a great approach if you want to focus solely on Windows 8, you may want to have the same codebase run on the Web, Windows 8, and other platforms that support HTML5 games. For this, I tend to use what I call a “web-first workflow.” The basic idea is that we continue to develop the game in Visual Studio, or your Web editor of choice, but do all of our testing and debugging in the Web browser while continually testing the game out on Windows 8. It’s actually very easy to set up, and you may find it to be similar to the way you already work.

Setting Up a Local Web Server

Chances are good that you are already working with some kind of local Web server for testing your own HTML5 game. I tend to use Apache since it’s widely used at this point and there are several stable builds you can easily run on Windows 8. Some of the techniques I will describe will also work for other servers, so don’t worry if Apache isn’t your cup of tea. If you are interested in using Apache, you can ...