Making Windows Store apps and Windows Phone apps with Fusion

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A few features including Passport are unavailable initially whilst we monitor stability of the new platform, we hope to bring these online very soon. Small issues will crop up following the import from our old system, including some message formatting, translation accuracy and other things.

Thank you for your patience whilst we've worked on this and we look forward to more exciting community developments soon!

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  • I'm curious, what is Clickteam's approach towards Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, and more specifically, creating games and apps with Fusion to be submitted to Windows Store and Windows Phone Store? Nowadays when XNA has been pretty much dropped by both CT and Microsoft, the existing exporter can't really be used to create content for Windows Phone Store anymore.

    How about the HTML5 exporter - can it be used or altered so that one could create phone/tablet apps for Windows Store? Obviously all modern browsers run HTML5, but I'm talking about distribution through centralized app store, like on iOS and Android.

    Even though Windows 8.X hasn't been a massive success for Microsoft, the new versions still account for some 15% of global desktop OS market share currently. When it comes to Windows Phone, there are markets where WP share out of smartphones is over 10%.

    Any thoughts, plans?

  • The windows mobile market is not a great prospect right now. This year the US smartphone share using it is 3.8% which is a decline of 20% from last year. This figure also includes older versions of the OS which Microsoft has effectively ended support for, so the audience for a windows mobile exporter is tiny. Then there's the fact that Microsoft keep changing their minds on technologies, feature sets, ending whole product lines and of course what they did with XNA.

    Again, not a promising prospect when you weigh it all up.

  • I purchased a windows phone for a university class which required one. Its actually a really good phone, at the end of the course i gave it to my mum for her first smartphone as its quite user friendly, but its biggest let down is the lack of quality apps.

    Just because there are less users using it, doesn't mean the potential earnings aren't there, the fact that there
    is little available in the way of quality apps or games creates such a big potential for indie developers.
    The Windows Phone market share may be small, but so is the amount of apps.

    For example:
    create a good Flappy Bird clone for Windows Phone- potential for thousands of installs, do the same on Android and IOS, well there's already hundreds (if not thousands) of clones, lucky if you get 10 installs.
    Same goes with creating a calculator app, shopping list app, Sudoku, pinball, space invaders, tide predictions etc.
    Basically every type of app/game has been done and done 100 times over on Android & IOS, if you do create something special, well then you'll need to invest into lots of marketing to get it out there and past the back page of the app catalog, this doesn't seem to be the case for Windows Phone yet.

  • I can't understand why you'd chase 3% of the market, when between ios/android you have a BILLION+ potential customers

    The answer is local apps for markets where Windows Phone is strong in market share but where the developer offering in Windows Phone Store is not that competitive as on other platforms.

    Instead of chasing 3% of global market, you could chase 30% market share (out of total smart phone market) e.g. here in Finland or 15% share in EU5 (UK, IT, GER, ES, FR combined). Many of these markets, Windows Phone is bigger than iPhone.

    How about Windows 8.X then, any plans for that? I read about Universal Windows Apps for all Windows devices, would this be realistic for Fusion at some point? Seems like it's Visual C++.

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  • Like Macca said, you might actually have a better chance of getting recognized when you develop for something like Windows Phone or PSM instead of iOS or Android. You don't have to worry about competing with the thousands of apps that are coming out per day in those markets.

  • Again though, that market is shrinking. It's not just about how many people you can reach in an unsaturated market, the quality of that market is important too.

    People just aren't buying into the windows mobile ecosystem and it doesn't matter whether it's XNA or directx based, it's a potentially sinking ship and this has to factor heavily in our considerations when we choose what directions to take.

  • While I don't think the Windows Phone is specifically a great target market, the touch encouraged nature of windows 8 is a pretty dramatic opportunity. Having some sort of Metro exporter for windows 8 apps would be a good step in the right direction. Windows isn't going to lose that much market share to Apple, and it certainly wont to Google either. My app runs natively on my windows 8 tablet, and it is frustrating (thanks Microsoft) that there is apparently no way to pin those completely capable apps to the metro start screen. I couldn't care less about phones, but this is one of those things that seems so close to being working I'd like to know how much work would go into pushing it the next steps forward.

    I can accept that Microsoft may have put some big hurdles in place, I'd just like to get a better idea of what they are and whether an exporter could be done in the future.

    It's also possible I am missing something, I just know I need to go to desktop mode to access my game build and I don't know what process if any would allow me to list my fusion app in the windows store and play it through the ease of a live tile.

    Even if windows 9 shuns touch, it's still a viable distribution network to build for. Is there an existing method for metro capabilities I am missing?

  • I've developed for windows phone using XNA, and my last game (six o'clock high) has been featured on the windows phone marketplace in several countries- mostly small ones, but also UK and France. Even though there was a sales spike, I was really expecting a lot more. I've made many more sales on iOS and android despite not being featured on those platforms. So even though the marketplace is less saturated, it is still lacking serious potential.

    Also I have some reservations about how they handle developer payments. They don't pay every month like android and iOS but instead wait until you're over a certain threshold- which is very confusing. Even then it never seems on time. I've given up trying to guess when they'll send me the next payment. Don't even get me started on the old XBLIG payment system, that was even worse.

    Also I think they've lost a lot of trust by ditching XNA. Who's to say they won't ditch their current frameworks in a few years? I wouldn't put it past them. I can't blame developers (and clickteam) for not wanting to develop for them just yet. They're going to have to work a bit harder to earn that trust back.

    That's not to say I wouldn't like a new windows phone exporter, it's a nice little extra to have the windows phone platform as an option. But seeing as CT are a small company with limited resources, I actually think it would be wise to see how things pan out first.

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  • I'm pretty sure you can use HTML5 to develop WP8 apps, anyway, so you would just need the HTML5 Exporter that already exists.

    I wonder if this can be achieved with the current HTML5 exporter of Fusion 2.5, or would it first need some alterations to the exporter itself by CT?

  • How about Windows 8 "Metro" Apps. (or without the Metro) for Tablets ?
    I know I can export just a Windows EXE file, but don't think that's enough for the store..
    Anyone know more about this?

  • I'd rather ask Clickteam to focus on fixing current bugs and imporove core functionality of MMF such as the event editor, unlimited variables, updating the very, very old GUI than to ask adding new features.

    MMF is getting updated very very slow, while Construct 2 for example has continous new builds and updates with added features.

  • For the record (it has been said before) there will never be unlimited variables for objects in MMF2 or Fusion 2.5. It requires a massive change to the core structure and we don't want to take the resources it would require away from Fusion 3 development. Fusion 3 will have this functionality.

    Construct updates are smaller and more frequent. Clickteam updates are larger build revisions. It may seem slower at times, but it generally averages out about the same.

    Also we have a different situation which you cannot compare so easily. Construct does NOT have native exporters for each platform, they used wrapped HTML5 which has really poor performance on mobiles and tablets. Clickteam has native runtimes for each platform. This means that we have to update every platform when new features are added and it takes greater resources, but the end result is leagues ahead.

  • On a related note, Microsoft announced yesterday that they will merge all versions of Windows into one OS. "This means one OS that covers all screen sizes." Please login to see this link.

    It's a sort of continuation to their April announcement of Universal Apps (which I mentioned in my earlier post here), which supposedly allow developers to code their app just once to be compatible with Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox.

    I guess these are good news for developers, and if Clickteam would ever consider creating a Windows runtime (a modern one) for Fusion, this would probably help to tackle all MSFT platforms at once.

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