Develop a Top down Shooter using Monogame

Hi, I am going to develop a 2D top down shooter for a scholl project using Monogame.
I have 0 experience with Monogame but a little bit of it in Unity.
Can anyone recommend me tutorials?

Check out my blog https://mygameprogrammingadventures.blogspot.com/p/monogame-tutorials.html. I have a three part miniseries on creating a top down shoot em up.

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Hi Fabio, welcome to the monogame community!

First of all good choice on framework, monogame is way cooler than unity😎

I don’t know how advanced you are with programming but I think RB Whitakers XNA and monogame tutorials would be good for most monogame beginners.
(Monogame is the open source continuation of microsofts discontinued XNA library, most examples will be exactly the same)
http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/xna-tutorials
http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/monogame-tutorials

Good luck, have fun

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is there anyway I can watch a video of the game? I want a movement looking like Binding of Isaac

I am having trouble figuring out how to use the framework. I use Visual Studio Code. Should I create a new dotnet project and then do dotnet install … ?

Personally I have no experience with using monogame and VS Code, and while I’m sure its possible I don’t know about any potential difficulties or pitfalls, so I would recommend just using big old Visual Studio.

For windows see https://docs.monogame.net/articles/getting_started/1_setting_up_your_development_environment_windows.html

MacOS and Ubuntu guides are available there as well.

I have found the monogame community to be super duper helpful, generous and friendly, and IMO it doesn’t get much better than a step by step tutorial for the exact type of game you’re trying to build… If you end up not liking the movement style, take what you’ve learned and tweak it until it’s perfect?

In the first paragraph she says the source code is available even! So you could simply compile it, try it out and do 0 work :slight_smile:

Cheers

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This series is making a topdown shooter

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ6ofHM1rvK8lQSoKX1USZstM-ZXikFHp

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There are videos on my Twitter @LadySynammon. However, movement isn’t like the game that you reference. It is a good place to start though to get your feet wet and understand Monogame. It can easily be adapted to use movement like you’ve referenced.

If you’re using Visual Code @Kwyrky has a project for creating MonoGame projects outside of Visual Studio. Check out their thread here about it: MonoGame Kickstarter.

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Great content on your website. Would be awesome to have in one book or ebook for purchase :grin:

I am a little bit confused about movement because sometimes the same youtube channel makes different videos for the same type of movement

is

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-mgcb-editor

really necessary? I enter it in the command line but it gets stuck

Are you sure it gets stuck? Maybe it takes a while to complete? I remember vaguely it did when I installed it iirc… :thinking:

Actually I cancelled it with Control C but I received the message saying it was successfully installed

Yes it was the same for me if I remember correctly. Does it work? I think to install it again / run the command again and wait for it to finish is maybe a good idea to make sure it really is installed correctly. But if everything already works it is maybe not necessary and since you got the installed successful message although you cancelled it with ctrl + c… Not sure what to do here :slight_smile:

Also worth checking out the NeonShooter example in the MonoGame.Samples repo, very snazzy :smiley:

Still working on the tutorial docs, similar to the Platformer.

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In general, there are lots of tutorials still available on Youtube on XNA, which is the API which Monogame was based on. You can do a simple search “xna tutorial 2d” and that should provide you with quite a lot of material to go on. I’ve not worked with Unity, but my understanding is that it is a game engine, whereas Monogame is more of a game API. I found XNA/Monogame to be such that I could design and develop my own game engine and tool chain, as it brings one down more to the rudiments, while giving you some nice convenient and simple APIs and approach to building a game. You have more freedom in some respects to build what you want, but may require more coding effort. I personally find it more appealing. I can decide to just build a game, or build an engine to build my game (which is what I am currently doing).

Good luck!