Looking to Build a Game for the Windows Platform?

Want to get into building your own games, but don't know where to start? Building gaming apps is proving to be where the opportunities lie, especially when you think of big players like Angry Birds or Doodle Jump. We are already seeing some local NZ developers go big with their gaming apps, In To The Dead, Bloons TD 5 and Bee Leader to name a few. Building games does require skill and, in most cases, is a little bit of a craft - it comes down to creative minds and talented people. But people who are craftier still, have taken their skills and created platforms that make it easier for YOU to build games. This means you can focus less on the HOW and more on the WHAT! Which comes back to the original title of this post – we are seeing a range of different gaming engines become available for developers to use: Just a week ago, Unity announced the latest release of their game engine, 4.2 which also supports publishing apps to the Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 platforms. As part of this, Unity have also announced a global competition that finishes on the 30th of September. Here in New Zealand, we are adding a little bit of an incentive by providing a games competition in which every kiwi developer can take part. With all this hype around gaming we thought it would be good to share some of the work we’ve been doing to help developers get in the game development world. Recently we ran a few gaming app workshops using Construct2 which is a tool that helps you build games without any technical experience. The tool provides a drag-and-drop environment to create your UI, and then an event page to add conditions and events. The tool builds the app in HTML5 and JavaScript, so you can simply export the app to a Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 equivalent using the built in plugins. And what’s more, you can do all this on the free version of the tool! To give you an idea of how easy it is,  take a look at one of the many tutorial videos below: ... and this video, which shows some of the apps built in just ONE DAY at a student bootcamp that we ran earlier in the year: Now, there is a whole bunch of resources available to build games, and most of them are available on the Construct 2 Page. There is no reason not to give it a go - especially when you see what can be done in a short amount of time. As part of this, we are also running several short training events to get you fired up and building your own game. Check out our current set of /events,and make sure you sign up to our /gaming-competition!