Jarred Capellman - MonoGame Mastery: Build a Multi-Platform 2D Game and Reusable Game Engine

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/978-1-4842-6308-2 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Building video games has an undeniable appeal in the imagination of many people coming from various backgrounds. Many children want to be game designers when they grow up and many programmers have learned the art of writing code thinking that they would, one day, create their own game.

Creating a video game is both an expressive art form and a series of logical challenges that must be solved. A game programmer needs to be creative while materializing the content of their imagination on a computer monitor, and at the same time, they must constantly solve the many physical constraints placed upon them as they shape their game. For those of us that enjoy solving problems and have a penchant for art, this is a dream field, whether as a hobby or, professionally, as a full-time job.

There has never been a better time for regular people than today to write video games! While hobbyists around the world have built games since the 1970s, the amount of deep technical knowledge required has diminished and the barrier of entry has dropped much lower in the last few years. Game tooling and game engines now abstract away the complexities of getting something drawn on a screen, while computers have gotten so powerful that programmers do not have to be so precise anymore in the way they handle memory management and the game performance. Furthermore, getting a video game published on gaming consoles and computers has become much more accessible today to anyone with the perseverance to bring their game to completion, as can be seen with the sheer number of indie games found on the market.

Software developers today have a wide array of technologies to choose from when building their game. One of these choices is MonoGame, a framework for creating powerful cross-platform games.

In this book, we aim to take experienced C# programmers through a journey as we explain game development basics and build a small two-dimensional vertical shooter video game from scratch, using MonoGame as our framework. By the end of this book, our readers will not only have built a reusable game engine that they will be able to use in their future games, but they will also have gained valuable knowledge to give them a leg up in their future projects, whatever framework or engine they decide to use.