Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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 topic we focused solely on getting an exciting HTML5 game to run on Win-
dows 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 work-
flow.” 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 continu-
ally 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 test-
ing 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 use a copy of WAMP (Windows, Apache,
another one-click Apache install solution, if you have used that in the past. Setting it up is
easy; I'll quickly walk you through the process.
Simply download the installer and run through the setup wizard (
Figure 8-1
). It's going to in-
stall to the root of your C: drive.
