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From YouTube: Building Games with MonoGame

Description

MonoGame is an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. It allows developers to create games for iOS, Android, MacOS, Linux, Windows, Xbox and PlayStation.

In this episode, Brian Peek comes on to talk to us about how to get started with MonoGame, and also show some interesting games that have been built with the framework

[00:31] - What is MonoGame
[02:09] - What does MonoGame support?
[03:02] - What are some games that have been built with MonoGame?
[04:37] - What is needed to get started with MonoGame?
[06:53] - What is the learning curve like?
[08:25] - Game + Code demo
[11:26] - How can you control screen updates?
[13:12] - How can you structure your game logic for reuse?
[16:24] - What is the testing experience like?
[17:31] - Where can you find resources to get started?

Useful Links

MonoGame - http://www.monogame.net
Mono - https://www.mono-project.com

MonoGame Showcase - http://www.monogame.net/showcase

MonoGame + CoreRT - https://github.com/dotnet/corert/tree/master/samples/MonoGame

Intro to MonoGame from Build 2016 - https://github.com/Microsoft-Build-2016/CodeLabs-GameDev-5-MonoGameIntro

Xbox Live Creators Program - https://www.xbox.com/developers/creators-program

XNA Game Studio documentation - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/xna/bb200104(v=xnagamestudio.41)?WT.mc_id=blogs-twitter-cephilli

Celeste - http://www.celestegame.com
Assassin's Creed Odyssey - https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/game

DirectX - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

A

In this episode of the all night show we have Brian P coming on to show us how we can build games with dotnet using the mono game framework check it out.

A

Welcome to another episode of the on.net show and with me today: I have my good friend brand Pete coming back. Are you doing right good? How are you doing pretty good man? So what do you have to talk to us about today? I thought.

B

Today we talked about mono game. We talked about unity last time, so let's try a different framework, this time, okay, development. So.

A

Mono game, so what is mono.

B

Game so model game is act. It actually started as an open source implementation of XNA XNA. So you remember XNA from a million years ago, most a framework that Microsoft had put out for I think the original release was for Windows and Zune I think and then later also had an Xbox 360 version, which is really what everyone is excited about to be able to put games on their Xbox way back. When is.

A

The zoom like that little angle,.

B

Phone thing is acquired, can we.

A

Set up a little, it.

B

Was our iPod I believe? Oh yes, yeah yep got it kind of so yeah. You could run that before we had phone and then it was later ported to phone as well. So you could do Windows Phone games. In addition, so this is an open source one-to-one mapping API. So if you have a game that was written in XNA mmm-hmm, you can literally open this up in mono game and pretty much without changes. Get that compiling and running nice for all the platforms that that mono game supports down so.

A

I remember before, like we used to talk a lot about DirectX and stuff like that.

C

A

How is that similar to DirectX or know.

B

A

Yeah is there anything or something completely? What's.

B

Great, is it abstracts away all the DirectX stuff, so you don't need to worry about it. So mono game supports 2d and 3d and support I mean any image or model type. You're gonna throw out its kind of support, but instead of you managing index buffers and vertex buffers and whatnot inside a DirectX, you know you're gonna get a nice object, that's gonna handle that is you're. Gonna use it from a c-sharp object. So.

A

B

Necessarily need to know how, with the internals of DirectX R, it's gonna hide all that from away from you and you're gonna deal with it at a much higher level, got.

A

It got it, and so, when I'm writing my mono game application, I'm guessing I could use c-sharp or I could also use plus, plus and like it's.

B

Actually see sure I think c-sharp only you might be able to work with V, B and F Charlie.

A

B

All it's all dotnet, so you should be able to use any language, but the most the officially supported language is c-sharp. Okay,.

A

Awesome and then it runs on I'm, guessing net net, core 2 or just like rule framework runs on.

B

Full framework right now, I'm.

A

B

You're poor too, if you're developing for iOS or Android, it runs on xamarin, okay, sonmanto proper, on mono, proper yeah yeah, but in goes to the same old process, to turn it into the native binary. On those platforms, however, that works sure and they're working on a a web assembly version. So you be able to export that out. It currently uses bridge net, there's kind of a experimental version of that which we can show later and they're, also working on dotnet core support, and they have it running with core RT today, but no.

A

B

On getting up getting it up with core proper soon cool.

A

So what are some of the like? You know, I like playing games right, who.

B

Doesn't show you like playing games, I do I.

A

Do it's like what are some of the popular games that I should check out that of use mono game.

B

Sure yeah I got a slide here. This is this: is the mono game showcase slide? If you go to mono game net, slash showcase, you can see a whole list of titles that you may or may not of plate or I've. Heard of my axiom verge was a huge game. A couple of years ago, I remember.

A

Their game yeah.

B

It's like a Metroidvania, so I think the genre that we call it we're kind of this hybrid of Metroid and Castlevania nice little former game, 100% mono game runs on PlayStation. 4 runs on this there's a switch version. Now there it's on Xbox one really popular game Bastion, which came out a few years ago. Another super popular.

A

Yeah yeah I know Bastion runs not only just on consoles, but it runs in, like I think the first time I played it was in a web browser. Ok,.

B

Ok, it could be could be I know it has a 360 game. That was the first time I.

C

Really did a million years ago, yet a.

A

B

Game I'm Celeste is probably one of the newest ones, which actually won a bunch of awards in the last year, really fun, but super hard platformer game. You.

A

B

For you, you're running and jumping and dashing in order to avoid spikes and collect objects, but a game that is super popular Fez, which came out a few years ago, also won a ton of awards. Right so I mean it's used to make a lot of games that are available today and that have been available the last couple of years. So that's.

A

Pretty cool, so I could do mobile game like you do PlayStation Xbox games yep her.

B

Which anything you can think of that you would want to support bottle game, will export it to partially community.

A

Great also so so what about the developer? Experience like? What's the tooling like, like what do I need to install? What do I need to have on my machine like.

B

God I get started with that, so if this is different, so what I always try to think of this as unity is very visual. So when you want to create you want to layout your levels or you want to you know if you're doing a 3d game, and you want to look at your models and place them in a scene, you're building scenes and then you're writing some code in order to drive that scene. Take that and flip it is, then that's how model game works. Model game is very code specific.

B

It's very code, heavy, it's code, first yeah.

C

B

The only tooling you really need is Visual Studio. If you are editing models or graphics or sound files and you're.

C

B

To need Photoshop or whatever tools, you're comfortable with Maya for 3ds, whatever it happens to be, but in terms of like there's, no visual editor for mono game. There's no I'm gonna drag and drop my character and put him here and then I'm going to write a script against it. Where.

C

You are saying.

B

When you drag your your image file into your project, there's this content pipeline thing that runs that kind of turns that into a version of the image that model game knows how to deal with. You.

A

B

Then, in addition hands you a C, sharp object that wraps that, oh so.

A

B

Image is now a texture. 2D object, alright, so you can then take that and say alright. Well, I want to put that texture 2d at position, X Y on my screen and every frame I'm gonna. You know.

A

You didn't move it and exactly my character, jump or right.

B

Over the cases, but the only time you see it is when you press f5 in visual studio and run the game. You know you're, compiling and running and actually seeing it as.

A

B

Is being played so.

A

It's a little bit like a code, run debug type, exactly.

B

A

No live editor, there's no live like UI crash.

B

View type type thing exactly that exactly you.

C

A

Have full control because you're using code, you're writing code yeah.

B

I mean there's a very thin layer that mono game gives you in terms of code, which we can go into the sample there a little bit, but it's very light. There's no, you know, there's no physics, engine, there's, no, there's, there's nothing there with you. You're building everything I mean there are physics engines that you can download and incorporating.

A

B

Exactly exactly, but it's not like some like unity, where you know every every everything that you plop on the screen has like a rigidbody and you can check a box and say well. This now responds.

A

B

Gravity and things like that, you're gonna write that got it so.

A

So as you're saying that I'm kind of wondering like what's the learning curve like for like for me as somebody that I'm not a professional game, develops sure, but maybe I want to tinker a little bit like. Is it something that's relatively easy for me to pick up.

B

I think so I mean if you are familiar with c-sharp yeah and you're, familiar with just the concepts of like a game. Loop, yeah.

C

B

Know a game loop is the thing. That's always running and basically you're gonna, like updating.

A

Update your UI pretty much yeah, it's.

B

Always that this concept of update and draw update is where you move the stuff. You do your physics calculations, you handle input from the controller and the.

C

B

Where you're actually gonna now I've calculated, where everything's supposed to be right, I'm, not actually gonna, plop, all that on the screen, I'm.

A

Gonna move it I'm gonna, put it somewhere, exact.

B

A

Like some of the my environmental assets- and you know things of that exactly.

B

Exactly in a scrolling game, you're going to move the background, you're gonna move the character forward. If someone press the a button you're going to start the jump animation got it. So if you, if you know those basic concepts to actually get, especially with the 2-d game, to get something up on the screen, is it's relatively simple.

A

Yeah I mean you, you.

B

Know XY coordinate system, yeah I. Have this image I want to put it here on this X Y and I want to move it and draw it. That's that's all it is okay. When you get into 3d, it gets a little obviously more complicated, because you need to deal with cameras and shaders and stuff like that, but even even basic 3d, if you don't have to deal with shaders, if you just wanted I have a thing that I pulled out of Maya or blender and I want to get it on the screen.

B

You know it's also pretty easy to do in mono, again, cool awesome. Well,.

A

I know you brought some demos for us, so what do we take? A look I'm sure, like you know, really quickly like what this looks like yep.

B

So I have a really simple game and I wrote this a while ago for build some year, I, don't even remember which I'll run it first. So we can see it and then.

A

B

Into a little bit of the code here, so this is a simple.

B

Pacman's style, game, Maine style game here, I, look like when everybody else pac-man. So this is. We show this off originally for Xbox, Live integration, okay,.

A

B

Can see, there's an achievements and a leaderboard here and I: don't have that hooked up right now, okay, but you can very easily integrate Xbox Live.

C

B

Model game. So if you click start here, they got off the title screen: I'm, the blue guy. The enemy is the red guy. He will chase me around the screen, while I run around grab dots and if I get the flashing icons in the corners I get more points. Oh nice, so recording.

A

B

Right so make sure you don't lose I I'm, pretty good at it. Most people think that the red monster is a little too aggressive, but that's fun. Okay, so that's the simple game and you know if I get eaten, I get eaten and then life counter goes down by what and you start over. Let me do again yeah so.

A

B

Simple game: all 2d all assets that a friend of mine, Joe, EBU, chuck drove up I was a draw up. I was have to give him credit and David Waldman for the music. Sorry.

B

So this is what I was telling you people always ask me like what would you do for images in assets I'm like well, there are packs you can download, also just make friends with a really good artist, a.

A

Really good musician and you're all.

B

Set, which is how.

A

My life worked out thinking about for dinner. One then he'll join you like some nice graphics, exactly.

B

That's what I thought that's how it works. So how is this written I mean this is a little more complicated of a game, because it's uh multiple screens got a title screen in the game screen and.

A

B

The leaderboard screen and the achievement screen which I didn't go into, but all those things exist, but the basic framework of mono game after you install it. You'll get a new template inside a visual studio, so file new mono game, mono game project and there are different projects. So it'll, there's one for Windows 10, there's one for cross-platform Windows.

C

B

There's one for iOS and Android, so you you choose.

C

B

Project you want and you'll get what is essentially, and this goes back to the XNA days. There are five methods that you need to know about: there's initialize, which is the very first thing that gets run, sure, there's load content, unload content, which you can see I'm kind of misusing them a little bit, but load content is where you load all your assets. You need for this scene. Unload is what's going to get called when that scene is over and you need to dump them out.

C

Of memory, okay,.

B

Update and draw so every every model, game game has those five methods, and what you do inside of those is: what is how you create your game.

A

Is this like the main, app events, or is this like a per? What's that word like a per scene or per assets? This.

B

Is this is the whole game? This is. This is like a very topmost level. Okay, so inside of, for example, update and draw. If you have multiple scenes, you have a title screen and a game screen sure you need to like maintain this state well, which screen am I on and then which.

C

B

Of these am I gonna update and which one am I gonna draw, okay in terms of update and draw which are the most important you'll notice that these both get what's called a game time and a game time will tell you how much time elapsed since the last frame- and you can have it- lie to you and always tell you well, if you're running at 60 frames per second well. mmm Sixteen point: six six six milliseconds elapsed since the last frame right or eat it was called wall time.

B

So no it'll actually tell you how much time elapsed. Okay and you use which one is appropriate for your game and the reason for this is you're doing physics. You know your characters, jumping you.

A

B

Your game is doing a lot of stuff, that's computationally, expensive, you might not be able to get an update, call every frame. You might not get a draw. Call every single frame. Yeah, remember like back in the old NES and Genesis days, where you'd be playing a game and you get a lot of enemies on screen and they give the game which is kind of slow down. Yeah, yeah and.

A

Enemies that come like the slower, the game goes exactly exactly so.

B

That's a that's the thing with video games, I mean it's just kind of having there. There was a hardware limitation here. You might just be doing too much that you can't be processed in one frame right. So you need to know how much time elapsed so that you can move the character the right amount on the screen so that it looks smooth because otherwise it might look jerky like those old games, did yeah.

A

B

This case you can you, can you.

A

Can control let the smoothness exactly you can use that game the time to actually.

B

Get an accurate calculation so as you're calculating velocities and acceleration. It's correct got it okay and then the other I mean those are the main things and there is um there api's again, you know, look at documentation on model game site or even our old XNA documentation. It's the same right for how do I draw something to the screen. Well, if I go into my game screen here and we'll scroll Wade to the draw method, so.

A

Quick question so.

B

A

At your folder structure, here, yeah of animations data, drawables things like that, is there any enforced folder structure? Not are you just? Those are just names that you created yourself just.

B

For my own organization, okay, yeah, the animations have the codes that drive okay, let's drive the code that drives all the different animation types. Drawables are like the sprites for the game, so you know so.

A

You can color there, everyone put it anywhere else. Yep, but like particularly this particular project is like a shared project. That's used across like your different platform. Yes,.

B

A

Platform specific exports- again, yes,.

B

And one of the things that I do is, if I'm doing a cross-platform game, I'll use our old-school, Visual Studio shared project, okay and I- put all of the game code in there, and so then, when I want to do the like the Windows version, I reference that just like you know, Visual Studio, you do a project reference to share it, so it pulls in all the game. And then you rate the window.

B

Specific implementation inside that project, so I have a universal Windows 10 across platform and an Android which have very little code in them themselves, they're all using the shared project right. That's.

A

Where all of your core logic and I'm guessing like physics, everything.

B

Everything is in there, yep got it it's like when I want to draw something on the screen and I. Think that's where I was going and I got sidetracked. There I can find a sprite batch.

B

Just pull one of these up here. So you've got an image, you've loaded it from disk it's in memory. How do I get it to the screen? There's that there's an object called sprite batch, which does exactly what it sounds like it. Batches, sprites and.

C

Shows them over to the video card. You.

B

Know so every sprite batch object, you create a sprite or sprite back. You create a sprite batch object and there's a draw method. What do I want to draw? Well I'm gonna, draw the image and there's a bunch of parameters. Where is it gonna go on the screen? What's the XY position? If I want to shrink it, I can use a rectangle, and then you know chop off a bit of it.

B

If I, if I wanted to, depending on the game that I'm writing I can tint it with a color, I canna scale it or shrink it based on a scale factor, a floating, a floating point value and there's a a drawstring method. That's lives off sprite back so I can say: I want to use this font and it created. You know you, you tell it what font you want, it'll create, what's called a sprite atlas for that font, so it'll take every letter. That's in that font. You.

A

B

Draw a 10-1 image: nice.

C

And then you don't.

B

See that image, but when you want to write hello world to the screen, it goes and knows where the H is, and it grabs the H and applause it on the screen and it grabs the e and plops it on the screen. Right.

C

B

So you can draw text on the screen very very easily without having to write like a font manager or re-implement GDI like you would and O's, or something like that. It handles all that, for you, nice and.

A

Like so, these are just unlike you mentioned, these are just regular gotta net products right so I.

B

Completely I could.

A

Use new god I could yep. You know if I wanted to bring in, like some external library or something like that, like I. Couldn't do that really easily, because.

B

Absolutely that's.

A

Nice, just like my regular dev workflow like.

B

Yeah I've done some stuff like with Azure, and you can go up and grab storage, STK sure and plop it in there. And you know, and.

A

B

Just works you just you just use it like you would in any other dotnet project right. So.

A

What's like the the testing and workflow for liking, gamers, you know like okay, I've done this thing, I've built it is. It just is testing just like playing the game.

B

This is where I've had this question before and I don't have a great answer: okay, the concept of like a unit test framework. Sorta works for back-end things; okay, so you you. Can you can sort of test your physics engine now I'm in this position, I mean you can even mock out the method and run it and say well if these two numbers go in, this is the number that should go out, but how does that translate to someone playing the game? You.

A

B

No real great testing framework, for is the game actually behaving the way it's supposed to right, but numbers coming in the numbers are going out, but is it actually working that is pressing f5 on Visual, Studio or giving.

C

B

Your friends and having people test it manually and playing the game.

A

I mean I, don't think it's a bad thing if, like to test, think I'm actually have to play the gateway.

B

Yeah, that's pretty fun. Well after you've been working on the game for a month and.

A

You listen to the.

B

Stupid music and the background playing.

A

B

Get a little frustrated: oh that's! Where the again make more friends. Okay, so they can play the game and take.

A

Your friends off for denim, like hey, could you play.

B

My please play my game for an hour. Yeah.

A

Yes, that's awesome, that's awesome! So now, if I wanted to learn a little bit more like I to find documentation or even sample games that maybe I.

C

A

And run like we're some place that I could go and.

B

So I always tell everybody: I mean the main mono game website mono game net from here you can download the project itself, you can it's all open source, so you can work it off github um and make modifications. If you wanted to there's also, you can also use mono games straight from nougats. So if you do you don't want to download it and use the Installer right.

C

B

Can reference mono game and the content pipeline street from nougat, and it will just work okay, so you don't actually even need the client, it's not where the client stall is handy and useful is that's where you get all the visual studio templates. So if you're really just starting out for the first time, those templates you're, probably gonna walk, is it's gonna lay out your object for you properly gives.

A

You some initial boilerplate code, I just don't have to think about exactly.

B

A

Focus on just really writing my game right.

B

Right I mean you could sit down and write the initialize and update and draw on all that stuff yourself or if you use the template just.

A

B

A template with an empty version of all that stuff so on here, if you click on documentation up on the top, well, there's downloads or you can download the full a client and templates they have documentation and actually, as silly as it sounds and see. If this link still works here, maybe they have it. Does that work go read the XNA documentation! Okay! It's it's in archive state on Docs that Microsoft calm right now, but.

C

B

It's a one to one implementation of XNA. Whatever you know, what is this parameter do in sprite batch, you.

A

B

The same, it works the identical.

A

C

B

Go and read that documentation yeah, so that's the I start there. That's the yep.

A

Got it so, the last time that you're on here before we ended the show I asked you what are some of your favorite games that you're playing that there.

C

A

Months ago so I'm gonna ask you the same question yeah like what are some of your favorite games, you're playing right now, maybe even some games that were built with mono game. The.

B

Game that I've been playing recently is Assassin's Creed Odyssey. How is that I I have I shouldn't, say: I've, never liked an assassin's Creed game. Okay and this game has just blown my mind. I, don't know I've they've changed it enough. Where this is. This game is just written for me. I just I've been I've, got like 150 hours sunk into it and really absolutely love it in the DLC and everything else. Mice.

A

B

That is consumed most of my time in gaming. Recently, okay, in terms of bottle game games actually Celeste, which was just on Xbox Live Gold, it was one of the free games and I had I already purchased it for the Nintendo switch. Previously, you.

C

B

Really fun quick paced, platformer games. Super hardware you'll, probably smash your switch over.

A

C

B

Also, just a really cool game with an interesting story: highly recommend that one for a mono game, game, cool.

A

Man we've got to make sure that we're gonna put those in a showdown, so make sure everybody go check them. Definitely.

B

A

Well, hey Brian! Thank you so much again for coming on.

B

Thanks for having me.

A

You're doing this and thank everybody for watching this has been another episode of the odd night Nets show, or we learned about building games with mono game. Thank you so much you take care.