I would like to distribute the binaries for my game to the artist I am working with, so that they can iterate on the content locally.
However, it seems like the “copy content from content folder to executable folder” step is part of the Visual Studio build process, and not something that the MonoGame Pipeline Tool can handle (as it simply builds the content
Is this a correct assumption? Is there an easy way to allow artists to iterate on content without them building the game themselves? Perhaps I just need to write a little batch file to manually do the copy?
Yes, the Pipeline Tool is specifically made to work as a stand-alone tool. When you use a template a custom msbuild .targets file will build and copy the content when you build the project. So you can just write a batch script or C# console app to build and copy the content for your users.
There’s no seperate download for the Pipeline Tool except for Mac (on the dowloads page), however you don’t need VS to install MonoGame. MonoGame only checks if VS is installed to install the project templates. So you can install it fine without VS. Alternatively you can build from source