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While it might not be a good fit for a some people, Monogame is still active, still ports to most systems, and it's totally free. I ported my old XNA/Xbox 360 g

While it might not be a good fit for a some people, Monogame is still active, still ports to most systems, and it's totally free. I ported my old XNA/Xbox 360 game to that pretty much in one night (since it's based on XNA) and have been working on remaking it for desktop/mobile/eventually console. It's still being used for some pretty mainstream Indie games, like just-released Streets of Rage 4, Flinthook, Celeste, Bastion, Fez, Axiom Verge, Stardew Valley, TowerFall, etc. Doesn't have all the mess or constantly moving target that everything else has, either. I mean it changed so little from XNA 4 that I could easily port a game designed for Xbox 360 over to it (shaders and storage took some extra time). https://www.monogame.net/showcase/ https://www.monogame.net/showcase/

disease 6y ago
That's an extremely impressive list of titles. As a hobbyist game dev I'm looking at moving to a multi-platform 2D game engine (last few games were done for the web using Phaser). The two engines that seem interesting are Monogame and Godot. My limited understanding is that you get more tooling and ready-made things with Godot compared to Monogame. I'll have to do another deep dive of these two engines soon.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  Godot looks impressive too from a casual look into it, and is also free, and definitely has more included. Monogame is more of a framework rather than a toolset, except for a Content Pipeline tool you're going to be writing just about everything in code. Monogame has the advantage that it has been used for commercial games, so you can get a good feel of what it can handle. Most of what I've seen showcased from Godot are more toy games, not really commercial. Now granted someone has to be the first to do it on Godot, but part of the reason you don't see it might be because it has some limitations you'll run into (but probably won't as a hobbyist developer). XNA also had a really large community at the time, and a lot of questions you have with Monogame, if you can't find the answer noromally, you can just look up the answers to for XNA and it will be the same answer, so there's a good amount of history to reference there as well. The important thing is just to pick something and start. After XNA died out, there was several years where I didn't make any progress because I kept going back and forth on what platform or tools I should use. I do recommend picking something open source and free, though, because I've had games get stuck on old proprietary platforms in the past and have had to port them to other platforms (i.e. Flash, Cocos2d iOS).
_bxg1 6y ago
Interesting, I remember messing around with XDA years ago when MS was making a huge push for it (before Unity was fit for anything but prototyping). It was a reasonably pleasant experience. Does it support 3D? I don't remember whether that was the case back then. Edit: There's a 3D game right on its home page :)
thrower123 6y ago
Monogame is really nice as a hobbyist. I also like that you actually have near full control of what is happening, rather than poking at a black box engine and hoping the bits you plug into it work correctly. Of course, I'm of the age where you had to write your own Windows message loop and wrangle OpenGL or DirectX yourself to do much of anything.

disease 6y ago

That's an extremely impressive list of titles. As a hobbyist game dev I'm looking at moving to a multi-platform 2D game engine (last few games were done for the web using Phaser). The two engines that seem interesting are Monogame and Godot. My limited understanding is that you get more tooling and ready-made things with Godot compared to Monogame. I'll have to do another deep dive of these two engines soon.

cableshaft 6y ago
Godot looks impressive too from a casual look into it, and is also free, and definitely has more included. Monogame is more of a framework rather than a toolset, except for a Content Pipeline tool you're going to be writing just about everything in code. Monogame has the advantage that it has been used for commercial games, so you can get a good feel of what it can handle. Most of what I've seen showcased from Godot are more toy games, not really commercial. Now granted someone has to be the first to do it on Godot, but part of the reason you don't see it might be because it has some limitations you'll run into (but probably won't as a hobbyist developer). XNA also had a really large community at the time, and a lot of questions you have with Monogame, if you can't find the answer noromally, you can just look up the answers to for XNA and it will be the same answer, so there's a good amount of history to reference there as well. The important thing is just to pick something and start. After XNA died out, there was several years where I didn't make any progress because I kept going back and forth on what platform or tools I should use. I do recommend picking something open source and free, though, because I've had games get stuck on old proprietary platforms in the past and have had to port them to other platforms (i.e. Flash, Cocos2d iOS).

_bxg1 6y ago

Interesting, I remember messing around with XDA years ago when MS was making a huge push for it (before Unity was fit for anything but prototyping). It was a reasonably pleasant experience. Does it support 3D? I don't remember whether that was the case back then. Edit: There's a 3D game right on its home page :)

thrower123 6y ago

Monogame is really nice as a hobbyist. I also like that you actually have near full control of what is happening, rather than poking at a black box engine and hoping the bits you plug into it work correctly. Of course, I'm of the age where you had to write your own Windows message loop and wrangle OpenGL or DirectX yourself to do much of anything.