Introduction

Who this book is for

This book is intended for people interested in game development using C# as your language of choice who want to target multiple platforms, including PC, iOS, Android, MacOS, Linux, PS4, PSVita, Xbox One, and Switch. Since this e-book is only a quick intro to the core information needed to get started, previous experience using C# is ideal, and almost required if you have no experience with another programming language.

If you have previous experience with Microsoft’s XNA technology, you’ll be very comfortable with MonoGame, and can probably skip most of this book.

A brief history

MonoGame can be thought of as the grandchild of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio technology. Back in 2004, Microsoft announced XNA at the Game Developer’s Conference. It took several years, but they eventually released the first version of XNA Game Studio. It consisted of three parts:

• A pipeline for importing game assets – graphics, audio, etc.
• A library of assemblies specifically for game development – graphics, special input handling, sounds, networking
• A custom run-time allowing XNA game to run on several different platforms, including PC, phone, and eventually, the Xbox 360

XNA was the first official major tool to allow anyone to get a game onto a major console. It was updated with a bit more functionality, but Microsoft killed it off not long ago by closing down the Xbox Live Indie Games part of the Xbox for new games. Supposedly, any games that were bought will be playable in the future, but that could change. Even before then, XNA was limited to Microsoft platforms, which made it less than ideal for some indie game developers.

Two different projects spawned from XNA: SilverSprite and XNA Touch. The first was an attempt to make a code-compatible version of the 2D portion of XNA that could be run in a browser using Silverlight. The second was a port of XNA to run on an OpenGL backend on mobile devices.  XNA Touch ended up using the 2D code from Silver Sprite, and the two eventually emerged as MonoGame.

MonoGame now is an almost 100 percent complete implementation of XNA 4 that can run on a number of different platforms:

• iOS
• Android
• Mac OS X
• Linux
• Windows
• PlayStation Vita
• Xbox One
• PlayStation 4