Announcing the MetroGameKit – a free, sample, starter project for Windows 8 Casual Games using HTML5 and JavaScript

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spacecadet   Pew Pew! Fire Lasers!

During the past couple of months I’ve been hacking around in the world of HTML5 Canvas and casual gaming.  The community that has formed up around HTML5 Gaming in particular is awesome and I am continually impressed by what I’ve seen.

Not to mention I’m a big retro gaming fan – 8 bits anyone?

With that in mind I wanted to contribute back to the community if I could.  I figured the best way I could do that was to take the experience I have writing Windows 8 Metro Style Apps and combine them with the world of HTML5 Canvas based gaming.

Things were super easy to bring over from a code perspective.  All of my layout is done through CSS3 (including media queries for ViewState), the game loop is straight up HTML5 Canvas with requestAnimationFrame, the music uses HTML5 Audio Tags, and the sounds use third party JavaScript libraries like SoundJS.

 

Get the Code

You can grab the sourcecode from Codeplex here:

CodePlex

Or GitHub here:

GitHub

 

Summary

I am replicating all the source back between GitHub into Codeplex so regardless of where you fork you will always have the latest source.

If you decide to write a Windows 8 app and want to get into the Windows Store I would love to hear about it!  You may also want to check out my previous Windows 8 Metro Style Development Tips:

Happing Coding!

-Dave