Stupid question - tablet friendly game - but can be PC friendly

Unity Engine
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1

I am wrapping up work on a game that’s original design lent itself to a tablet …
Currently in final states of Play and App store submission.

Trying to figure out route to take on the windows side of the house - now with the surface tablets and windows phones, etc.

I don’t know any of the particulars of Windows phones - but I know that the new windows surface tablets actually run windows 8 (aside from the ones that run RT)…

That being said - do I simply ‘build’ my app assuming a windows target? (while I capture mouse input - Unity happily interprets touches and taps for me).

Does the Windows Store handle both PC and tablet apps/games?

Any other insight would be appreciated.

2

Well, since you seem to know nothing about WSA/WP8, here’s what you need:

  • A machine with Windows 8 and required dev tools (Visual Studio and SDKs)
  • Both desktops and tablet machines run Windows 8 (or 8.1), just RT tablets run ARM version of it.
  • Windows 8 desktop is fully capable to run apps for tablet, just there are some specifics like touch screen keyboard does not work (because you have a real one) and you typically don’t have touch support, but have mouse instead.
  • The primary problem is that Unity does not use Mono on these platforms, it uses .NET. There are some incompatibilities, games built for other platforms can do hit these. That might require some code changes.
  • If your app is designed to run on phone, Windows Phone is no different, except for .NET instead of mono.
3

Thanks for the summary - that helps huge!

4

Some more details that might help you:

There is no distinction between tablet and PC apps on Windows. You can create traditional Windows applications, which will run on ‘regular’ Windows, or you can build modern ‘Windows 8’ style applications that will only run on Windows 8 (including RT). Windows Phone is a separate platform to Windows 8/RT, and works much the same way as Android/iOS as far as Unity in concerned (but you may run into issues due to using .Net as mentioned above).

I assume you would be creating a Windows Store (i.e. modern Windows 8) application for inclusion in the Windows Store and playable on Windows RT tablets (and Windows 8 computers). Microsoft’s guidelines insist any apps must be usable with a mouse and keyboard as well as touch. This is because you can never know if the target device has a touchscreen or mouse/keyboard input as a Windows 8 device can have either (or both). Unity generally treats a mouse click as a touch anyway (as you mentioned), so it’s pretty easy to cater to all devices.

The Windows Store has a limited way to include ‘traditional’/desktop applications (you can list them but must provide your own download source/webpage, manage the payments, etc.). Modern style apps are listed just like on Android/iOS - Microsoft hosts them, manages the sale, and pushes through updates, etc.

So for Windows you will want two versions: Windows Store and Windows Phone. The Windows Store version should support mouse and/or keyboard input as well as touch. Also keep in mind that Windows Store apps must support multiple resolutions, including when the player has two apps on the screen at once taking up half the screen each.