Why the second approach? Well, compared to the installer, the Git repository is updated more often with the latest bug fixes and new features.įor this part, you will need a Git client.
The second one (which I will explain in detail in this post) is via a Git repository. The first one is to download the MonoGame installer from here.
You can choose between two approaches in order to install MonoGame. If you get stuck somewhere, leave a comment below. If you already have Visual Studio 2012 Professional or above, you will need to install Windows Phone 8.0 SDK in order to create an XNA Windows Phone project for the assets. I will talk about this in detail in one of the upcoming parts in this series.
xnb files to your Visual Studio 2012 for Windows 8 project. This Content Pipeline is not yet implemented in the Windows 8 version of MonoGame, so you will need to first compile the external assets in Visual Studio 2012 for Windows Phone (that supports XNA) and then copy the resulting. XNA has a Content Pipeline that is used to compile all the assets for your game (sprites, models, sounds etc.). You are probably wondering why you need Visual Studio 2012 for Windows Phone. There are other alternatives for developing Windows 8 games that can be published to the Windows Store such as HTML5/JavaScript or DirectX.īefore moving to the set up of MonoGame, first we need the following: In this series, I will use MonoGame to show you how you can create a simple Pong clone which is considered the “Hello World!” of Game Development ? The games that are created with MonoGame can be published to the Windows Store. Thanks to Tom Spilman and James Ford from Sickhead Games, and few other talented developers, MonoGame now supports Windows 8. MonoGame is an open-source implementation of the XNA Framework, mainly created for XNA users so they can port their games to other platforms such as iOS, Android, Mac etc. Because of this, I had to look for other alternatives. On the other hand, the ordinary desktop games work just fine. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided not to continue their active support, so the games created with XNA cannot be published to the Windows Store. You can also develop more serious and complex games like Fez, Terraria, Bastion etc. XNA is a great framework for beginners and you can easily and quickly develop little games or prototypes. This series will consist of several parts where I will try to explain the steps you need to take in order to develop a simple 2D game for Windows 8 that can be published to the Windows Store.