After doing a little bit of reading about some of the more popular frameworks and game engines that are out there and talking to one of my coworkers who has experience with game development, I decided to start off with the MonoGame framework. If you don't know what MonoGame is, their website has a nice and concise history of the project and you can find more info on it with some quick searching. Briefly, it's a re-implementation of Microsoft's XNA video game framework, which they stopped developing in 2013. The goal was to provide support for XNA on more devices and continue to support the API once XNA was discontinued. Why MonoGame? Mainly because it allows me to write my code in C#, which I am very familiar with. I wanted to start off with something that would be easy to pick up and get stuff done in.
After installing MonoGame I started looking for good tutorials, and found RB Whitaker's Wiki, which seems to have a plethora of information on XNA, MonoGame, and game development in general. I went through some of his MonoGame tutorials which take you through the very basics of the framework and some simple 2D stuff. In the process I learned for the first time about what a game loop is (as I said, I knew little and was starting at the basics). In the end though, I learned my way around the framework a bit and ended up with a cool little program of swirling lights to demonstrate additive blending using sprites. Not a game, but fun to watch nonetheless.
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| I tried to make a GIF but it looked terrible. It is pretty fun to watch the colors change. |
After going through those tutorials I wanted to start working on an actual game and I figured a good place to start would be a Pong clone. It seems relatively simple, but I'm sure it's also going to be a good challenge for me. I'm trying to see how much of it I can get done on my own without having to look up examples of Pong games from other people. So far, this is what I have:
Notice there's absolutely no collision detection yet. That ball will just keep moving in the same straight line forever. But look, I also added walls!
And that's as much as I've gotten done so far. I haven't had much time to work on this during the busy holidays, but I'm hoping to get a little more done this week. I suppose I'll try to make it bounce off the walls next, which I'm sure is going to be an interesting challenge.
So what are my goals for the future? I'm still trying to figure that out, to be honest. I want to also play around with the Unity game engine sometime, since it also makes use of C#. I think it would be interesting to compare it to MonoGame and try to get a sense of which I prefer, since they're really different beasts. So I had the idea of attempting to make a Pong clone in Unity as well. I may also try to make some more clones of other really old games for fun, like Breakout. And after that? I have no idea. I don't really have any original ideas yet, but that's the goal that I eventually want to work toward. And if I do come up with an idea and actually make it, maybe I'll put it up on itch.io and see what happens. I'm not doing this with profit as the main goal, after all. I just want to have fun with it.
But for now, I'm just going to focus on making this ball bounce around the screen. :)
Until next time!
