Which 2D/3D framework/game engine makes my life much easier?

I want to develop a 2D game next year that has many different features like cross platform(iOS, Android), in-app purchases, ads(Admob), remote notifications in different languages, displaying a list with the best highscores of all the players (worldwide) in your game, achievement system, some code that detects the resolution of the device and scales the game if necessary, 2D physics engine(similar to Farseer Physics Engine), 2D camera with zoom, parallax scrolling, level editor, a class that handles the 2D animations, shaders, particle system, maybe some features that I need for an online coop mode, etc.

Which 2D/3D framework/engine has these features and many more? Is it possible to do the additional coding(that I need to do myself) in C#? I don’t know other programming languages.

In addition, a godd documentation and many tutorials would be great. I don’t want to lose time with coding the features, foremost the online features are too difficult to do it myself. I want to focus on game design and creating a nice game.

1 Like

Well, basically you just described Unity

1 Like

What’s the difference between Unity, Nez and MonoGame.Extended? I know that Unity is the most famous and many people are using it. But is Unity the only game engine that has all these features and many more included?

Well basically you just described XNA…

EDIT

Joking aside,

cross platform(iOS, Android), [SAY HELLO TO MY LIT… MONOGAME!]
in-app purchases, [USUALLY PLATFORM SPECIFIC]
ads(Admob), [3RD PARTY USUALLY OR PLATFORM SPECIFIC]
remote notifications in different languages, [MIGHT WANT TO GO CUSTOM ON THIS AND LEARN SOME WEB DEVELOPMENT IN .NET C#]
displaying a list with the best highscores of all the players (worldwide) in your game, [PRETTY SURE THERE WAS A POST ON THIS A FEW MONTHS AGO, WITH CODE BUT AGAIN, LEARN SOME WEB STUDIES WITH .NET C#]
achievement system, [UNSPECIFIC]
some code that detects the resolution of the device and scales the game if necessary, [LOOK AROUND HERE]
2D physics engine(similar to Farseer Physics Engine), [GRAB A BOOK ON PHYSICS AND ALGEBRA]
2D camera with zoom, [LOTS OF THAT ON THIS FORUM]
parallax scrolling, [MANY CODE EXAMPLES ONLINE AND PRETTY SURE THERE WAS A POST ON IT ABOUT SIX MONTHS AGO]
level editor, [GAME SPECIFIC, 2D, 2.5D ,3D ,OTHER D]
a class that handles the 2D animations, [GRAPHICS PIPELINE]
shaders, [GRAPHICS PIPELINE]
particle system, [PHYSICS ENGINE]
maybe some features that I need for an online coop mode, [NETWORKING]
etc. [UNDEFINED-BUT POSSIBLE]

And to answer the Tutorials question, start grabbing everything you can on XNA… before the internet evaporates them…

Take a look at one of my threads, some other users - who should post theirs here as well - also have some good compilations:

1 Like

Then probably MonoGame is not the framework for you. Solutions for most of the things you mention have probably been integrated in MonoGame by someone and are available if you can find them, but you will have to do some legwork to put it all together and to implement the missing features. Especially on the networking, I don’t think there’s a great solution you can just plug in (at least I don’t know of any).

We typically say that if your mindset is to design a game and make it playable you should go with something higher level than MonoGame like Unity.

2 Likes

I would have to agree with all of the responders here in that for what you are asking for, MonoGame would be not an appropriate choice for you as it does take a tremendous amount of work and research to make it work for any specific game design, unless you have been using such tools for quite some time.

That being said, there are several alternatives to Unity you may want to consider, as Unity is becoming quite old and does not appear to have the freshness that it once had.

One alternative would be the tools from The Game Creators in the UK at the following link… The Game Creators. These tools are probably the easiest to use with the best support for the majority of games you may want to consider designing. And they are all quite affordable.

Another would be the the Cry Engine at the following link… Cry Engine

And finally, the Xenko Engine at the following link… Xenko Engine

The latter two engines do not have the extensive support as with the Unity Community but their proponents have found the engines to be superior to that of Unity.

For any 2D game, Monogame is the answer, the possibilities are endless. It is true that at first it gives more work than all those luxury engines, but if you want to continue developing video games, you will learn a lot and many of the things you implement will be reusable in your future projects.

1 Like

I think that biggest Monogame disadvantage is in missing of full documentation, tutorials with examples. For example as for me that although I know Monogame since 2012 but I’ve not done any game yet, only simple application for desktop. Just this year I decided to do my first game on Monogame.

Any tutorial for XNA will work for Monogame and that’s quite a lot of resource. Personally as resource (Quality + Quantity) goes, especially free one, I find it to go Unreal Engine > Monogame/XNA >> Unity.

So maybe you give link to tutorial for XNA

Is there a game engine that works similar like MonoGame/XNA? In MonoGame/XNA, you have LoadCotent, Update, Draw. Are there any game engines that have a similar structure or is the code completely different compared to MonoGame/XNA?

Which game engines are the best for networking? I need a game engine that has step by step tutorials and code samples to make it the easiest as possible to implement an online multiplayer mode in a 2D game for iOS and Android. In addition, the game needs a physic engine.

I posted earlier with a link to the The Game Creators tools. Just scroll up from this post and you will see it.

It is by far the easiest set of tools to use since there is so much documentation for them…

:slight_smile: