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[Daniel Pellicer]

Hello guys.

I participated with a couple of friends in Ludum Dare 30 and we used LibGDX to make our little thing. Even if it was quite easy to use and brought enough good results we found that the performance of the game was relatively poor and investigating a little bit we realized that there is people who dislike java for making games a lot.

Reading around I've found that there exists MonoGame. Is a framework like LibGDX but programmed in C#. Games like Bastion, Fez or TowerFall have used it succesfully, but taking a look at the available tools, engines and frameworks in the fix section of this subforum I didn't see MonoGame (I think LibGdx was also not there)

I wanted to know your opinion on this both frameworks but Im also very interested to know about the opinion of those people who have used MonoGame.

Thanks in advance!

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Absolutely love monogame. If I'm making a game I usually pick one of the following 3 options :

1)C++
2)Monogame
3)Haxe/Haxeflixel

It's a great framework and it's pretty raw so it doesn't impose on your design (outside of the general C# way of doing things).

I'm not sure exactly how good the performance will be, c# has a few things that allow it to have theoretically better performance than Java but I think in the real world there's not too much of a difference. Unless libgdx renders in some bad way, which I dont believe is the case.

[Lycaon]

I'm fond of MonoGame and LibGDX, but I don't like programming in Java. For me making a game, I generally go with (in this order)

• Unity
• LÖVE
• Haxe + OpenFL
• Monogame/XNA

[Will Huxtable]

I'm making my current project with MonoGame, and I'm loving it. As has been said, it doesn't impose too much on you, so you're free to do things pretty much however you want to. It is a copy of the XNA API, and XNA has been used for a lot of games. This means, most tutorials/code snippets and even libraries that work with XNA are very likely to work for MonoGame. To be honest, I haven't really had any trouble with it in the past few months. I'd recommend it!

[saturdaymorning]

I ordered a Nexus 4 over a year ago, and it was going to take about a week for it to arrive. While I waited, I figured I would try to build something so that the first app I installed was a game I made. I knew nothing about Android development, but I was able to get a small, pretty dum thing running using LibGDX before it arrived. It's pretty sweet. I haven't used it since though.

I've heard a lot of good things regarding MonoGame. If I were to start something new and wanted to be more hands-on, I'd use it.

[Daniel Pellicer]

Absolutely love monogame. If I'm making a game I usually pick one of the following 3 options :

1)C++
2)Monogame
3)Haxe/Haxeflixel

When you say c++ what do you mean exactly? You make your own engine?

[InfiniteStateMachine]

well I wouldnt call it an engine, just sort of write what I need for the game I'm making.

[Richard Kain]

When you say c++ what do you mean exactly? You make your own engine?

Some people like to code as low-level as they dare. Also, there are actually a TON of game engines that are compatible with C++, so using C++ doesn't necessarily mean that you're rocking your own solution.

I tend to avoid such development myself, but even I've gotten my hands dirty with C++ from time to time. While there is less of an argument for extreme low-level development these days, you occasionally run into scenarios where it's necessary. And knowing some of those basics always helps.

[Daniel Pellicer]

Ok I've realized Monogame needs a xamarin license for developing for android, iOs and Mac. That forces me to make one step back and rethink my possibilities again.

People here is bringing up Unity but I thought Unity was basically for doing 3d games. What I want for now is to make 2d games.

I've investigated a little bit and outside of Thomas Was Alone I didn't find any big Indie game made with Unity. Do you know a couple? (Is not so easy to find which engine is used in different games)

Edit: xamarin written correctly :p

[nikki]

Unity has a out the box 2d workflow since a year or so.
On the other hand: the xamarin license you'll need for IOS/android on monogame  you'll also need it for Unity (since that's what Unity uses too), actually you will need the Unity licences for that (which are significantly more steep)

https://store.xamarin.com/
https://store.unity3d.com/products/pricing

makes me wonder where that 50$ diff goes per customer per platform

[dancing_dead]

if you don't mind coding up the basic tools for yourself to use, then xna/monogame is fine. it's often a lot faster/easier, tho, to use some of the more "advanced" (advanced in the sense of offering a lot more out of the box) options, such as unity, ue4 or whatever.

I do recommend taking a look into ue4. they're currently actively developing their 2d workflow, and you can already get pretty far with what they got already. they will want royalties, tho, but the quality of their tools is, imo, well worth it. you can deploy to mobiles, too, even though only a limited subset of (the beefiest) smartphones is currently officially supported.

[Paul Jeffries]

I've used LibGDX for the last couple of games I've made and I have no real complaints.  I like that it gives you a library of standard functionality but also provides wrappers for 'raw' OpenGL calls as well, so you can go back to basics if you like.

I also looked briefly at MonoGame a couple of years ago when I was looking for multi-platform engines, but like you the fact that you had to pay for Xamarin to compile for android was a deal-breaker for me.  It's a shame, because I would much rather use C# over Java, but ho-hum.  That said, Java isn't really too bad; it's missing a lot of features that I would ideally like (properties, events and pass-by-reference to name a few) and I can see why some people don't like it, but it does the job OK and I find it quite a fast language to develop in once you've got used to its foibles, so don't necessarily write off LibGDX if write-once-deploy-everywhere is a high-value feature for you; I don't know of anything better in that regard.