Hello all, I run a game development site called GameFromScratch.com that is known primarily for tutorials and tutorial series. By request of a few of my readers, I recently started a new tutorial series covering all aspects of MonoGame. As a huge fan of XNA back in the day, and having seriously missed C# in recent tutorial coverage, I’m really enjoying working with MonoGame. I had intended to cover it in the past, but if I am honest, it was the lack of a content pipeline that kept me away.
The series is pretty young at this point, you’ve got to cover the basics first or you lose many people right away. So far I’ve covered an overview/history of Monogame/XNA, install guides for Mac and Windows, then finally an initial technical post on application lifecycle, game loops, etc… The next chapter on graphics ( mostly spritebatch ) is currently a WIP and should be up within the week. If you want some idea of where I will probably go with the series, you can check out prior tutorial series I have worked on. Basically if enough people are reading them, I keep writing them until I feel I’ve covered pretty much everything worth covering. If you’ve got a suggestion I am certainly open to it. With this series I am actually making it in a chapter by chapter format with the intention of publishing it as an ebook when finished.
Oh I suppose this would help… here is the series table of contents page. As I mentioned earlier, it’s still pretty young, 4 chapters or 3 videos. It should give you an idea of my general style and format. Expect new chapters on graphics, then input very shortly. I will update this thread as I post new chapters.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated. I hope these prove useful to the community. If you see a technical error in the written content ( not much I can do about video at this point sadly ), please let me know and I will address it. Suggestions on what to cover are also welcome. As I mentioned earlier, I will keep working on these so long as people are reading them… not much sense in putting a lot of work into something that doesn’t have an audience after all. So if you like this series, please share it! I do think there is certainly an appetite for an updated series, especially with the more recent developments in MonoGame, and that fact that so many old XNA tutorials are now outdated or the content isn’t applicable to MonoGame.
Yeah, sadly no Linux installs in my household. My laptops just don’t play friendly with me running Linux, all laptops, two with only small SSD drives and the 3rd simply doesn’t play nicely with Linux, no matter which distro I try installing.
I am doing all of the examples in a single solution as separate projects, that will ultimately be pushed up to Github. I simply haven’t done the push yet, as I’ve not got much code to push. I certainly will be though.
What you see is essentially the book. Think of this entire project as one massive, developed completely in the open, book project. I will periodically be compiling all the chapters together, formatting for book ( removing animated images, laying out pages for “print”, etc ) form and making it available for Patreon supporters in epub, pdf and mobi formats. Then once “complete”, I will do a full compilation, a proper table of contents, index, forward, etc… and self publish. I should actually have the first draft of the book pushed sent out this weekend. Again, it’s basically the same content, especially during development!
Basically this means people pay if they want, but certainly don’t have to. Hopefully this model works out for me and I can take this approach in the future instead of the traditional publishing method. The traditional publishing approach took pretty much the same amount of effort, the work was much slower and less agile and it was useful to a great deal less people ( aka, the people who bought the book ). I guess I will see how this approach works.
As to your direct question, yes, yes and sorta. Yes I will teach more advanced stuff, yes I will cover shaders, sorta. I will cover very remedial shader creation and their usage in MonoGame but nothing more. Shader programming is itself a book filling topic after all.
I just published the next part, Textures and SpriteBatch. It covers texture loading, SpriteBatch rendering which includes various sorting and blend modes available. Essentially it could be called “2D Graphics in MonoGame”, although we will be covering more 2D graphic topics shortly, so I went with a more literal title.
The video version should be available in the next few days, depending how the weekend goes.
Series formally announced on reddit, generally a pretty good indicator of how popular it will or wont be. That said, announcing anything on a Friday afternoon generally isn’t a great idea.
Additionally the first draft of the book Cross Platform Game Development with MonoGame was made available to backers. It will be updated and released with the new chapter later this week. The book is a compilation of the tutorial content in epub, pdf and mobi formats, as a reward for those that support GameFromScratch, as well as for eventual release in stores.
Not strictly a new chapter ( coming very soon btw ), but I figured I would share this tip that run into the same issue. It’s a tip on how to install XNA Tools without requiring VS 2010 to be installed. So for example, if you want to get XACT but dont have VS, this gets you there.