My first Windows 8 app, Squish-a-Fruit arrives in the Windows 8 Store

After several hours of coming up with a concept, working with my colleague Maria Naggaga, and using templates created by my colleague Jim O’Neil for Scirra’s Construct 2, my first Windows 8 App is now available in the Windows 8 Store. Squish-a-Fruit is a family game for all ages where the goal is to squish as many pieces of fruit as you can. Now be careful, the game’s over once you miss three pieces of fruit, and I’ve also found it to be a bit addictive… Feel free to download it here, its FREE.

There’s lots to share about this entire process, beginning with the fact that most of you know I’m an IT Pro, not a developer. Sure, I could write bad code on some antiquated and obsolete programming languages I used years ago, but they wouldn’t get me very far to developing a modern HTML5 game like Squish-a-Fruit. Scirra’s Construct 2 is a fantastic tool to do just that and my colleague Jim O’Neil had created a number of templates and starter kits to help us non-developer types put together a game in just a few short hours. You can find a blog post he did with a link to those templates here. After I discovered this, I approached my colleague in New York, Maria Naggaga to help me with some pointers on Construct 2, understand what I needed to modify in the template, and how to submit the app, once created, to the Windows 8 store. After several hours of going through coming up with the concept and modifying the template, the app was done. I then created a Windows 8 Developer account on https://dev.windows.com, setup the account and the release of the app, and then submitted to the store. This was a lot of fun and I wouldn’t be surprised if I did another one soon.

Enjoy!