Louis Salin - Game Development with MonoGame: Build a 2D Game Using Your Own Reusable and Performant Game Engine

Louis Salin and Rami Morrar

Game Development with MonoGame

Build a 2D Game Using Your Own Reusable and Performant Game Engine

1st ed.

Logo of the publisher

Dedicated to my family and friends who keep pushing me forward.

Rami Morrar

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-7770-6. For more detailed information, please visit www.apress.com/source-code.

About the Authors

Louis Salin

has been a developer for more than 15 years in a wide variety of fields, developing on Windows in the early days in C, C++, and eventually C#. He also worked as a developer on Linux-based web applications using different scripting languages such as Ruby and Python. His early love for coding comes from all the time he spent as a kid copying video games written in Basic from books borrowed from the library. He wrote his first game in high school and took many classes in computer graphics.

Rami Morrar

is a self-taught game developer with a few years of development experience under his belt. Morrar spent his days as a young kid hacking his Nintendo consoles with homebrew software. In his early adult years, he delved into languages mostly found in the family of C programming, such as C# and C++. He is a freelance technology writer who reviews games and writes tutorials on MonoGame. He is currently working on his own independent project in the framework as well.

About the Technical Reviewer

Andrey Talanin

is a fourth-year student getting a bachelors degree in software engineering at Higher School of Economics, a public research university in the Russian Federation. He is a backend developer currently working with .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and Transact SQL. He started playing around with C# at the age of 16. Nowadays Andrey is building a web developer career with C# as it is a perfect language for modern enterprise applications. Meanwhile, he is keeping an eye on some pet projects, many of which are games or game libraries created with the MonoGame framework (formerly Microsoft XNA).

The first step on your journey to turn a game concept into a fun and enjoyable game is to take a look at your game performance and improve it. Game performance should always be in the back of your mind as you develop your game. The reason for this is that a slow running game has a disastrous effect on the players enjoyment of the game. From skipped frames that hinder the players ability to aim a weapon and shoot enemies to game stuttering that makes the game unusable, bad game performance is something that should be avoided at all costs.

As your starting point, take the game developed in the MonoGame Mastery book, published by Apress. In that book, a game engine and core loop were created. In this book, youll take them to the next level. The code for that game is located here: https://github.com/Apress/monogame-mastery .

In order to seamlessly detect movement in a series of images displayed on a screen, as in the case of animations or video games , the images must be displayed in succession at a pace that is rapid enough to fool the human eye. Any slower than that and the eye will have time to see each image on its own and fail to connect them together as a fluid animation . Think of flipbook animations , where each sheet of paper in the booklet has a single image. If you flip the pages in rapid succession, using your thumbs to control the speed, your brain will meld all the images together into the illusion of movement if the speed is fast enough. Each image in the flipbook is called a frame, and how fast those frames are displayed is measured in frames per second.