michael Surface tends to perform poorly and the simulator isn't accurate. Feel free to send me a build with an fps counter and I'll let you know how it runs.

From my experience studying fine art, or solid digital painting courses are more likely to end you up at a AAA company. Studying graphics/illustration will push you towards a unique style which would set you up for independent projects or freelance game work.

Maaan I wish I knew about this a couple of years ago. Creating animated tiles is such a mission.

This is awesome! I'd be interested to see if the canvas plugin is definitely a better alternative - especially on mobile devices.

Creating sprites for the largest resolution is generally the way to go.

I asked the same question when I started with C2

VRAM usage can be a concern, but on most mobile devices I've found CPU to be more of an issue.

Export as an HTML5 website and test in IE10 on Windows 8. If the performance is the same as the app, then it's just because IE isn't as fast as other browsers and you'll need to optimise your game. If it's a lot faster in IE than as an app then something's going wrong.

Make sure you're not checking performance while deployed from Visual Studio - run it from the tile on the start screen.

I agree with — Learning JavaScript is a great place to start - you can use it with Construct 2 (which in my opinion is the best place to start) and can then move onto 3D with Unity (which supports JavaScript) if you so desire. After that, moving onto C# in Unity will make you very employable and the transition is painless.

Just to be clear, for game testing it's recommended to get a low-to-mid spec device so that you can cater to the widest audience and maximise performance. If you go for the best devices from the offset you may run into performance troubles further down the line.

Have a look at this thread and see if it fixes it: http://www.scirra.com/forum/topic61789.html

Hi Rob,

The version you uploaded works great.

What the video shows is that after quitting the app, you're relaunching it from icon, which by default starts the application from the beginning. If you quit the app and tap the back button, you'll see the activation/deactivation working as expected.

The functionality that you've described and want to achieve is called 'Fast Resume'. You can find more info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj735579(v=vs.105).aspx. To enable fast resume, open up WMAppManifest.xml and add ActivationPolicy="Resume" to the DefaultTask element. E.g.

<DefaultTask Name ="_default" NavigationPage="MainPage.xaml" ActivationPolicy="Resume"/>

It's important to note that you don't have to add this to pass certification.

Thanks for trying out Mortar Melon :D

Awesome guys, thanks very much :)

Add me on Skype if you still can't get this to work and we'll go through it - hoffmania1