Returning to Monogame with a different project

 Wow... 2 of these in a month! Crazy! 

Anyways... I want to write about my latest endeavor into Monogame/XNA again. I feel that I have found some good resources that showed how the framework actually works and what you can do with it in terms of Physics and Sprite Effects. It's really cool and honestly, I'm having a blast using it right now. I have a tech demo in the works for a cool shmup concept and I honestly can't wait to share it. But for now it's going back Unity and finishing this game I have. 

    But if you do want to know what XNA is like, I recommend some small tutorials that will help you  understand how XNA works better. XNA is not a proprietary Physics Engine. It doesn't have things like gravity scaling or rigid physics to it, making prototype development a bit harder to manage. Collision is also not handled like in other engines where you have 2 colliders in an engine and have AABB  and OBB collision to choose from and it'll work. You have to explicitly state what interacts with what for every single object or write a function/collision system that handles all your collision for you (In this case however, that also requires different behaviors for different object classes as well). 

    However unlike most engines, Monogame's memory usage is very small and doesn't have much bloat to components like Unreal or Unity to your program. 

If you want to learn how to get started, I recommend RBWhitaker's XNA tutorials on how XNA works and later some beginner friendly exercises like this Shmup game right here. 

Another resource I recommend are the official Monogame and Monogame.Extended Discords. People will help you out if you're new and will give you tutorials on how to learn.

Anyways, I'll post updates soon on the project when it comes out. I'll see you guys around.

Update

Hello everybody. It's me. 

I know I don't update on here and it's pretty blank, but there has been on some issues, both technical and personal as of recent. 

I honestly don't know where to begin on the technical project. The progress for my new game project has been slowed down a lot. I was originally using XNA/Monogame since December and was using someone else's foundation/engine to help me. The problem with their engine though is that.... it's not all that well implemented when it comes to certain things like SpriteEffects and Game States, which... honestly frustrated me to all hell when I was working on the platformer project for over a year now and that basically wasted my time, so I'm taking all the sound effects and assets and am porting them to Unity.

Now I want to stress this... this is NOT THAT PERSON'S FAULT. XNA/Monogame coding/documentation is so rare to find and cumbersome that I don't blame them for wanting to create their own engine from scratch off the framework. That and even Monogame libraries with some documentation are still hard to learn. It's either something like an overload of a function goes unused and I don't know what it's asking because I don't know what that specific overload does or it asking for stuff that I don't want to use because it just bloats memory. Also my lack of knowledge on the framework itself has also really hurt the progress of my project and most of that is definitely my fault. I am however sure to whip up a base prototype of the game by Tonight in Unity and am hopefully able to hire some freelance artists to actually get the game on Steam/Itch.Io at the beginning of 2021.

I did however learn personally though that... you shouldn't rely on others to build your boat. Sometimes... you just gotta find the wood yourself.

Speaking of personal, my overall growth as a programmer has been plateaud for a long time. I don't feel that I've grown at all this Year compared to last year. Some of it is due to lack of motivation, but most of it is due to financial hardships thanks to this stupid ass lockdown that hasn't really done much to prevent the spread of Covid imo. I've been going out and trying to sell stuff on Ebay, but the pay is just not there. 

It's not an excuse for the lack of my own performance, but there are other reaeons besides those want to keep personal that have also affected my learning experience in coding, mostly time spent with other obligations that I cannot seem to get away from. 

Anyways I know this was a hefty blogpost but do know that I will be posting something in the near future about the project. In the mean time, stay tuned for more updates. I know I am active on Twitter and stuff, but that is literally the only rarest of times I am on my phone or social media.  

Anyways... In the meantime, have a wonderful day, stay safe out there and hopefully I will have something special real soon.