Did you know that Balatro wasn’t made in a game engine? It was made with the LÖVE framework, which uses the Lua programming language. I’ve never used Lua before, but it reminds me a lot of Python (no semicolons). I thought I’d give the whole framework thing a try, and set aside Unity for a bit. However, I don’t know Lua, let alone LÖVE. So, what is a C# fan to do?
Introducing MonoGame. Like LÖVE, it is free and open source. Unlike LÖVE, it uses C#. MonoGame was used to developed a couple big games, including Fez, Celeste, and Stardew Valley. A couple indie hits, you may observe. Maybe this is the strategy- create a game in an open source framework, work on it by yourself or in a small team, and boom- commercial success. Of course, I don’t make games with the goal of money, but money is nice. Honestly, I just want to reach the point where I go to tell a friend to try a game I’ve made, and they tell me they’ve already played it.
Anyways, to learn how to use MonoGame, I decided to start out with recreating my first solo game jam game, Nosediver. Nosediver is based off of a game made for the TV show Black Mirror, Nohzdyve. It’s honestly nothing too crazy, just a man falling through the sky and dodging obstacles while collecting power-ups.
When I started in MonoGame, I quickly began to miss Unity features. One such feature was the GameObject. I found myself recreating GameObjects in MonoGame. As of now, it essentially just stores the sprite and position that the object has, along with Update and Draw methods. I was going to call this class GameObject, but I wanted to be different. Combining “Zclipse” and “object” conceived what I like to call the “Zobject.” Very creative, I know.
Starting off was a bit slow, but it was cool to see things grow from the ground up. Definitely stay tuned.
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