A good Book Recommendation for MonoGame

I am planning to create games with MonoGame but the problem is that its hard for me to learn it.I know the Basics of Mono/XNA but I want to learn Advance Stuff hence I would like to buy a book which covers from Basic to Advance Level and covers various techniques which is used in this modern time. I am starting with 2D, if possible tell me a good book.

“Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Game Development”
http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Phone-Game-Development/dp/1430258365

The book covers several areas very well, but is obviously focused on Windows Phone development. So it covers also platform specifics regarding to Windows Phone, e.g. how to open a dialog to ask the player to rate your game or that you have to handle the windows phone back button to pass the tests to get admitted to the store. I submitted my first game yesterday and it was in the Windows Store within 3 hours after I submitted it http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/marauding-gems/e74d5c04-462a-42d8-ab6e-9d13ac87fc78.

I just wish a similar book would be available to cover all the Monogame specifics for other platforms like iOS and Android.

Thanks for recommending my book John, and I’m glad you found it useful – Amazon reviews are always very much appreciated!

The book is of course Windows-based as you say, but there’s a fair amount of material there that would be relevant to all MonoGame platforms. I think to try to use it with a different operating system, though, you would probably need to be fairly familiar with developing non-MonoGame apps for that OS already, in order to deal with all the platform-specific things that the book only covers for Windows. Perhaps combining it with another platform-specific non-gamedev book might be a good combination?

Marauding Gems looks interesting, I’ll have to take a look.

Oh, I did not expect the author of the book here - the book was useful and I will write an Amazon review (haven’t done it yet). The XNA/Monogame part is universally applicable to all platforms.

If you ever plan to make a revision of the book and add a few chapters how to port your game to different platforms, then this would be my wish list :wink:

  • Setup the iOS/Android project in Xamarin (Indie on a Mac), although that is just changing and pretty difficult because of the new Unity platform and no real support for it yet.
  • Differences in generating game content (MonoGame Content project in VS2010 with MonoGame content processors for platforms iOS and Android) - that is a trap I ran into yesterday night and could not load SpriteFonts in iOS which I just copied from Windows project
  • How to bring up a dialog to rate your game on Android and iOS
  • How to integrate Android and iOS Game Center (and the Windows Phone equivalent, I know this does not work yet)
  • How to do in app purchases in Android and iOS (haven’t done that in Windows Phone yet either, maybe it is supported already in MonoGame)
  • What to look out for when submitting the app to Google / Apple, your chapter about what to do before the Windows Phone submission was very helpful
  • (nice to have): How to do a Facebook like of your app
  • (nice to have): How to post your high score to Facebook
  • (nice to have): How to post your high score to Twitter
  • (nice to have): How to integrate with the different advertising platforms
  • (nice to have): How to promote your game

It took me, starting yesterday, until today to get my game running in iOS of which I spent the majority of the time figuring out how to setup the project in Xamarin (with Unity) - so I am pretty impressed with MonoGame, I did not expect everything to work so flawlessly.
Most of the platform specific things above I still have to figure out - but that’s part of the fun learning something new :smile:

While it’s still around, not a book, but might be what you’re looking for as well, Xbox Live Indie Games. This is the old Microsoft XNA documentation, tutorials, examples, etc… but everything I’ve tried works for it with little to no modifications.

It’s also quite a learning experience to make stuff work in a new Windows/Windows Phone project.