For a while now I’ve wanted to create a website for tutorials on MonoGame that would be a more in-depth discussion of my videos.
So this would be essentially the same code, but I’d give more descriptions on what’s actually going on, and why I do things a certain way. It also means I can go back and amended any potential mistakes, or whatever (which is harder in the video format).
This is the current design that I created a while ago.
I guess my question is - would this something that could be useful to the community?
Since it can take a so much longer created articles on coding, I don’t want to spend a ton of time working on something that isn’t really necessary.
I prefer written tutorials more than video tutorials.
A lot of times my connection is not that great so video tutorials appear as a blurry mess for me. Also if I remember a certain snippet that I want to take a look at it’s easy to scan or search text versus attempting to find a spot in a video.
I imagine making text tutorials can be more time consuming though.
Personally I think anyone who takes the time to make tutorials about Monogame with good intentions improves the community.
Personally, I do have long term plans with C#, .NET and MonoGame. I love the entire ecosystem of C# and I intend to stick with it. So I would be very interested to even pay for more MonoGame tutorials.
Regarding video, I have no problem with videos. Depends on the topic some times I prefer to see it in action also because english is not my first language and in case I’m not entirely certain what is that we are talking about, seeing it in action almost always switch the light in my head. But providing a written version of your tutorial could be also an option. After all, in order to make a good video you do need to write some sort of script to follow and also need to try the example codes to make sure the code is valid and you also need to make screenshots. So, the way I see it, you could basically write a tutorial and then make a video version of it and offer in both video and written form on your website maybe also in PDF form to download.
As someone who is new to Monogame, I would love to see more in-depth tutorials for it. A text-based tutorial would also make it easier for people to go back and find specific things they are looking for.
I believe it would very helpful to have tutorial that goes into detail in teaching how to use the functionality of the API. Simply having an API reference does nothing to help people understand how to use the various functions and methods for the games they are trying to develop…
Yeah, this is my problem too. I can read the docs all day long but I have no clue what am I looking at. Fortunately so far I was bale to find examples and sources to see how others done certain things which is very helpful but still at times very difficult to reverse engineer how something has been implemented.
Even with libs like MonoGame.Extended and Nez, there are lot of things I’m uncertain how to do.
@Oyyou
I prefer videos but If you find making video tutorials too much trouble I would personally find even written tutorials extremely useful. Not sure what is your plan exactly, but if you want to launch a website dedicated to MonoGame tutorials and it would be free to access, you could still sell the content in PDF format for offline use if it something matters to you…
This is a good idea, and +1 for text tutorials, for 2 reasons:
the avaibility of the video is lower than text (you can simply load a text one and read when you want, no need to have active connection)
for non native eng speaker, this is far, far easier to read a text. Thus you 'll drastically improve the reach of the tutorial
On my side, i sticked to Monogames as a multitouch capable framework for RPi. Sadly it is not but i liked a lot the concept / ease to use and should stick to it for personal projects.
I suggest taking advantage of all of the existing tests whenever possible instead of explaining what and how to use a VertexBuffer for the 100,000th time on the internet. Refer to (or repeat) the tests and just annotate an explanation of what it’s doing and any why that comes with that (though there usually is no why - barring some absurdist justification for one).
Always get the vibe that no one ever bothers reading the tests, which are a living tutorial.
