Porting old XNA XBLIG game, release on Xbox Live Creator Program?

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Hi folks, new to these forums so apologies if this has already been covered.

I made and released an old (and not-very-good) XBLIG game called Clover: A Curious Tale back in like 2010. It’d be nice to make it available on Xbox again, just for preservation’s sake if nothing else.

I’ve got backups of the XNA Game Studio project, but I no longer have access to a Windows machine - I’ve been doing stuff on Mac professionally since then.

I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would be able to save me some time spelunking through articles, by perhaps being able to helping me with:

  • How much effort is it to port the code from XNA to MonoGame? Hopefully it’s as simple as a search-and-replace on imports!
  • Is it possible/easy to have a Mac-based development rig? Is using VS Code an option?
  • How does one package and deploy a MonoGame project for testing on an Xbox? XNA Game Studio used to do all that for you.

I wonder if anyone from the XNA/XBLIG scene frequents this place… Would be a blast from the past to chat to people again!

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I can’t answer your questions regarding Mac development but deploying works similar to XNA Game Studio Connect. Instead on Xbox One you switch to Developer mode and deploy through Visual Studio or build an app package and upload.
(Set up your UWP on Xbox development environment - UWP applications | Microsoft Docs)

A lot of the code will work with MonoGame but just some of the things to bear in mind when porting to the Xbox Creators Program are:

  • Handling different resolutions (this wasn’t needed for the Xbox 360 as it would auto scale to different resolutions when the backbuffer was set to 720p)
  • Adding mouse/keyboard controls if the game will be released as compatible for Windows through the Xbox Creators Program
  • Replacing any storage code and maybe using the Xbox Cloud Storage API (although for UWP this adds a rather confusing permissions popup)
  • Replacing any avatar/networking code
  • Replacing any marketplace code with the Windows Store API for the trial mode and purchasing

Also if you released back in 2010 did you release using XNA 3.1 or XNA 4.0? It may be necessary to update the code to the XNA 4.0 standards first to be more compatible with MonoGame.

Hope that helps.

1 Like
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Belated thanks! I’ve just had the time away from family life to start tinkering, and it’s great fun learning something ‘new’ after getting burned out in an enterprise IT career.

Looks like I was using XNA 3.0, so even more old-and-crusty than anyone expected.

For others looking to do stuff on MacOS, the following got me to a running ‘CornflowerBlue’ template project:

brew install dotnet
dotnet new --install MonoGame.Templates.CSharp # got error message, not sure if necessary
mkdir test && cd test
dotnet new mgdesktopgl -o Test
cd Test
dotnet add package MonoGame.Framework.DesktopGL
dotnet run Program.cs

I’m yet to try any VS Code integrations, but if I can do stuff from the terminal, I’m a happy bunny.