MonoGame (for those of you not yet aware) is a Game Building Framework / API born from the ashes that was the Microsoft XNA Framework that provides a very easy to use API to build games. (or 3D Apps)
What makes MonoGame far better than its XNA heritage, is that MonoGame is built from the ground up to be multi-platform, supporting many of today’s modern platforms, including:
Android
iOS / MacOS
Windows 8 / Windows 10
Linux
Even Consoles
And many more (still growing)
MonoGame has even extended the Content pipeline that XNA introduces (an asset management system) to also make assets like Art, Textures, Models and so on, work for every platform from a single configuration / building platform.
Check out the MonoGame Framework on their awesome site with an even more awesome URL: http://MonoGame.Rocks (Sooo cool)
They truly believe in the “Build it once, Ship everywhere” moto.
Welcome to 2017
As of March 2017, Microsoft has now released their next generation development management suite called Visual Studio 2017 (actually I’m running out of different things to call Visual Studio with all the hats it wears). Visual Studio enables developers to Build / Manage / Deploy and maintain almost any software solution, especially on the Cloud.
With this new big release, the Monogame also kept pace and released the latest version of the framework, MonoGame 3.6, which includes full support for Visual Studio 2017.
You can check out the full details on the 3.6 release on http://MonoGame.Rocks
MonoGame 3.6 March 1, 2017 by Tom Spilman in News, Releases We are happy to say that MonoGame 3.6 is now available for download. Thanks as always to all the hard work from the MG developer community that made this release possible!
MonoGame 3.6 Pipeline GUI Tool for MacOS standalone installer
You can read about the major fixes and features in our new change log.
Like its predecessor Visual 2015, Visual Studio 2017 has full free support (thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin) for deploying to all of these platforms now. So it makes this open source FREE framework even better to pick up and start building with.
Why not Unity, Unreal or Other Game thing X?
When you are picking the Game Development framework or engine to start with (or jump to), it’s important to choose what you want to build your game / project in using something that suits your development style.
Unity and Unreal have a great editor / GUI experience with some coding required, so it’s a good fit if you like drag and drop.
Scratch / Game maker and others offer a much more stripped down and basic experience meant to wet your appetite. Although I have seen some serious projects built with these
XNA / FNA / MonoGame on the other hand, are a full coded experience. So if you prefer to control all the bits of your game and not rely on things being done for you, it’s a better fit.
There are those who then also like to go even lower but we shall not mention such things so as not to scare the birds, lest they fly away.
