When working with XAML to develop a game for Windows 8 the first question most of you will ask is, how do I animate a sprite on-screen? The best answer is to use a Canvas control. In this post we’ll take a look at how to accomplish this.

For Scramble Legends, Alex and I wanted to make the sound design more subtle and natural as opposed to overly bright and sci-fi; the idea was to use pleasing, simple audio to augment the player’s actions without necessarily driving them altogether. We also wanted emotionally distinctive sounds (positive, negative, victory, defeat, etc) that weren’t over-the-top with regard to the feedback they intended to convey.

Early on I decided to use Azure. First because I was using .NET and the tooling support is great. Second because I am a BizSpark member and have some free Azure resources. And third because I did not want to mess around withservers or other infrastructure but still wanted to know my game could scale on demand. Having decided to use Azure, I still needed to determine how to persist Scramble Legend’s data. Two solutions stood out: Azure Mobile Services and Azure Cloud Storage.

XAML and C# are great technologies for creating apps. However can you create games with them or must you take a dependency on MonoGame? While there are many reasons to use MonoGame I believe there are some compelling reasons to stick with XAML and C# when developing games for Windows 8. Based on my experiences developing Adlib, Petunk, and Scramble Legends, I’ve tried to provide a guide to help you make a more informed decision when developing a game for Windows 8.

When developing games for Windows 8 with C# it is not immediately clear how to construct a basic game loop. For other Microsoft platforms XNA is the obvious choice. However because Microsoft does not support XNA in Windows 8, developers are left to their own resources. After developing several games for Windows 8 I have compiled my experiences on the various ways to implement a game loop for Windows 8 and C#. I invite you to read on and decide which one best suits your needs.