Just got the email last night, Falling Balls is now available in the Windows 8 Store!
I’m really interested to see how this does. I’ve implemented Bing ads in the game, exactly the same way they are implemented in the iOS version, i.e. when you die, there is a banner ad in the top center of the screen. It goes away when you start playing, so it’s not there to distract you from game play. You don’t want to see an ad – don’t die! However, I’m not seeing any ads in the live app. It took a while to see any at all while I was testing, though it worked fine using a test ad account. From looking at various forum posts, I think they just don’t have that much inventory, so there is very low fulfillment rate. I may need to switch to another ad provider if Bing doesn’t pull through soon.
I also have some additional features I want to add to the game. Considering making them in-app purchases, but if I can get ads working a bit better, I’d be happy to keep them free.
I assume you went the route of HTML/JS based on your previous posts. I’m looking at something that will run across all Win8 flavors phone, tablet, desktop. Have you done any research there? It doesn’t seem like JS is a viable option there. Wondering if C# is and how to implement. Do you have any info on something like that?
Yeah, I did HTML/JS on the apps I’ve done so far. I did some Windows Phone 7 development a while back. That was all Silverlight/C# for apps and XNA/C# for games. Great stuff. Windows 8 app dev is XAML for layout and C#/VB/C++ for code. I installed the Windows Phone 8 SDK the other day but haven’t checked into it yet. But it looks like the templates support XAML projects, XNA projects and HTML5 projects. So it should be pretty easy to write portable code across the two platforms.
The JS dev you are doing, are they rendering that in an embedded WebView or is it drawing on a DirectX surface? I’m curious where the JS runs is it translated down to IL?
Plenty of bing banners when I die so I guess they came through