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I am trying to determine the best way to dynamically discover new levels in my Windows Phone game. This is necessary because I will be selling some levels separately to those included with the initial game purchase. I assume that it is possible for such purchases to be automatically downloaded and merged into the same directory that contains the game itself.

All my levels are pre-processed and stored as XNBs. Ideally, I would be able to obtain an enumeration of all XNBs of a particular type (ie. Level) within my game directory, but I cannot find a means of doing this. Alternatively, if I could get a list of all XNB names then I could use a naming convention to identify levels. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to do that either.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Can anyone shed any light on how I might dynamically discover content in my game?

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the only thing that I can see about updating applications is through "push notifications" which is about turning the application into an active listener, and then when an "update" happens to go out, and get it. not sure about selling them, but here is what I found windowsphone.interoperabilitybridges.com/articles/… – gardian06 May 19 '12 at 12:22

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It took me some searching but WP7 does not support DLC and Micro-Transactions so you can't expand your game with extra levels via the marketplace so that's why you couldn't find the functionality to browse for extra files in your game directory.

What you can do:

On WP7/XNA you have full socket access, you could put up a web service and download extra levels from there. You could even launch the browser so that people can buy stuff directly from you (read the disclaimer!). You can then store them in the app folder using the built in IsolatedStorage. You can also easily retrieve the data from there.

BIG FAT DISCLAIMER

I'm not sure how happy MS would be with customers paying you directly for DLC, even though they don't offer these services themselves. There are some apps that do it (the Kindle app is the best example) but they could have a private contract that doesn't apply to you. Your app could get pulled if you just launch with this functionality so contact MS so that you know what is allowed. They are usually quite helpful!

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Well that sux, but thanks for the answer. I will indeed look into my legal options further. – user13414 May 20 '12 at 14:09

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