Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3-7. The UI and camera clipping at 1024×768 pixels for the Windows 8 version of the
game.
Live Tiles
Live Tiles are probably one of Windows 8's most prominent features. Live Tiles are the icons
on the new start screen, but these are more than just app icons. Like the name implies, these
tiles are animated and can contain a wealth of high-level information about the app. When it
comes to games, we can do some interesting things, such as display player stats and high
scores, and even entice the player to come back to the game if they haven't played in awhile.
For the purposes of getting your first Windows 8 game to be published, I am just going to fo-
cus on the basics of setting up Live Tiles.
Luckily, the easiest thing you can do in order to set up a Live Tile is simply replace the de-
fault tile image in your project's images folder. This was automatically created for you by
Visual Studio. If you open up your .appxmanifest (
Figure 3-8
)
, you will see all the default
Live Tile options.
