Video games are on our computers, our consoles and our phones! Lots of people play them and every year more people are making them. If you have ever played a computer game and thought, “I wonder how they do that?” or, better yet, “I want to make something like that,” then this course will get you started. Game development is what got many developers into programming. But how many of us actually ever learned how to create games? Creating games can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be that way!
MonoGame is a cross platform gaming framework based on Microsoft’s XNA framework that’s extremely easy to learn. MonoGame is a simple and powerful framework for creating games for desktop PCs, video game consoles, and mobile devices using the C# programming language. Best of all, games you build with MonoGame will run on iOS, Android, Mac OS X, tvOS, Windows, Linux, PlayStation 4, and more—write once, play anywhere. It has been succesfully used to create games such as Streets of Rage 4, Carrion, Celeste, Stardew Valley, and many other.
It is a re-implementation of the discontinued Microsoft’s XNA Framework, and it provides the following features:
- Game framework
- 2D and 3D rendering
- Sound effect and music playback
- Keyboard, mouse, touch, and controller inputs
- Content building and optimization
- Math library optimized for games
There’s no shortage of options when it comes to game development environments. From full-featured engines like Unity to comprehensive and complex multimedia APIs like DirectX, it can be hard to know where to start. MonoGame is a set of tools, with a level of complexity falling somewhere between a game engine and a grittier API like DirectX. It provides an easy-to-use content pipeline, and all the functionality required to create lightweight games that run on a wide variety of platforms.
MonoGame is a “bring your own tools” kind of framework, which means that it provides the building blocks to build your own engine and tools, but it isn’t quite an engine itself.
If you are expecting a scene editor (like Unity or Unreal), MonoGame is not that.
If you love coding and understanding how things work under the hood, MonoGame might be what you are looking for. And fear not, getting a game running with MonoGame only takes a few minutes.
Best of all, MonoGame apps are written in pure C#, and you can distribute them quickly via the Microsoft Store or other similar distribution platforms.
