It is kind of nice for indie games, unfortunately it is kind of stuck in what XNA 4.0 had as API surface.
And it used to be there was still some dependency on old XNA plugins for assets pipeline on Visual Studio.
No idea where this stands now.
However it was yet another example of community standing up for the anti-.NET sentiment at Windows/XBox teams, when the persons involved left XBox team, XNA was quickly replaced by DirectX TK.
There isn't really a comparison to be made between MonoGame and Godot. MonoGame is for programmers. Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development. Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.
I think the greatest flaw in MonoGame, however, is that their cross-platform abstraction notably excludes web. Given how relatively thin MonoGame is, I think you're better off building your own framework that supports compiling to WASM as well, if you have any experience as a developer already. It is what I did and took some effort but was pretty well doable and didn't take all that long, and the payoff of being able to share your games instantly in the browser for anyone to play with just a click of a link is so worth it.
The other notable flaw in MonoGame is that the content pipeline thing it has is horrendous. When I tried it, I ended up simply bypassing using that pipeline at all. They are currently in the process of reworking it completely, I believe, but I'm not sure when that's supposed to release.
Maybe the value in MonoGame is that it does support consoles, though; I have no idea what developing for console is like, and only target web/computer/phone OS platforms myself.
> Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development.
You can write a lot of code when using Godot and mix that with capabilities provided by their editor.
You never have to use editor features, but can use them to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel.
Your comment is like saying that game engines are used by people who don't care for programming and would rather make a call to handle physics interactions.
It's always funny to me that this metaphor is used to indicate a bad thing, but re-inventing the wheel is actually very valuable. Note that our vehicles do not run on stone wheels. Thank goodness we kept re-inventing wheels that were more suitable for our specific use cases! This metaphor is, therefore, exactly apt for describing off-the-shelf game engines. All of the big open game engines are heavy and make a ton of decisions for you that will not be optimal for your specific game, because they make generalized decisions necessary to support all kinds of games. This does save you time, and you can absolutely make games that are good enough with them, but it's ridiculous to me to describe making your own engine as wasting time. It's spending time to gain a benefit, which is a trade-off that is worth it for some and not necessary for others.
What are the capabilities needed for Stardew Valley? Drawing 2d sprites. Playing audio? That's a pretty low bar to reach. MonoGame doesn't even support animated sprites. You have to build support for them yourself. That sounds like a pretty low bar.
I used Monogame back when it was a proprietary framework called XNA developed at Microsoft.
You used to be able to use XNA to build Indie games for the Xbox 360, hard to believe, but this is going on 15 years ago at this point.
I built two indie games and made a couple of hundred bucks back when I was in High School. It's actually what got me into programming in the first place.
I'm happy to see that XNA became Monogame, it's one of the best frameworks I've ever used for gamedev.
It is kind of nice for indie games, unfortunately it is kind of stuck in what XNA 4.0 had as API surface.
And it used to be there was still some dependency on old XNA plugins for assets pipeline on Visual Studio.
No idea where this stands now.
However it was yet another example of community standing up for the anti-.NET sentiment at Windows/XBox teams, when the persons involved left XBox team, XNA was quickly replaced by DirectX TK.
"The billion dollar decision that launched XNA"
https://youtu.be/wJY8RhPHmUQ?is=jwDBVae8AhBH-ANB
https://walbourn.github.io/directxtk/
I used MonoGame to port my XNA games to other platforms.
It’s really good, also it was very cool as a junior developer to see the code for the methods I used.
I did the same. It was cool seeing some of the games I came up with back in the 360 days running on iPhone and Android devices.
For a more actively maintained XNA implementation, also worth looking at Ethan Lee's FNA: https://fna-xna.github.io/
How well does it support Linux + NativeAOT? Thanks in advance.
Never mind, found this in the docs: https://fna-xna.github.io/docs/appendix/Appendix-A%3A-Native...
I was trying to compare the two. At first glance, MonoGame has far more stars and recent commits. Or is it just in maintenance mode?
I believe FNA is trying to be more loyal to the original XNA while my monogame tends to introduce new features.
I've been happy with monogame when I used it in the past. I'm pretty sure Celeste was made with FNA
If you are wondering about the capabilities, Stardew Valley was made in MonoGame.
I wonder how it compares, if at all, with Godot nowadays.
There isn't really a comparison to be made between MonoGame and Godot. MonoGame is for programmers. Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development. Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.
I think the greatest flaw in MonoGame, however, is that their cross-platform abstraction notably excludes web. Given how relatively thin MonoGame is, I think you're better off building your own framework that supports compiling to WASM as well, if you have any experience as a developer already. It is what I did and took some effort but was pretty well doable and didn't take all that long, and the payoff of being able to share your games instantly in the browser for anyone to play with just a click of a link is so worth it.
The other notable flaw in MonoGame is that the content pipeline thing it has is horrendous. When I tried it, I ended up simply bypassing using that pipeline at all. They are currently in the process of reworking it completely, I believe, but I'm not sure when that's supposed to release.
Maybe the value in MonoGame is that it does support consoles, though; I have no idea what developing for console is like, and only target web/computer/phone OS platforms myself.
> Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development.
You can write a lot of code when using Godot and mix that with capabilities provided by their editor.
You never have to use editor features, but can use them to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel.
Your comment is like saying that game engines are used by people who don't care for programming and would rather make a call to handle physics interactions.
> wasting time reinventing the wheel
It's always funny to me that this metaphor is used to indicate a bad thing, but re-inventing the wheel is actually very valuable. Note that our vehicles do not run on stone wheels. Thank goodness we kept re-inventing wheels that were more suitable for our specific use cases! This metaphor is, therefore, exactly apt for describing off-the-shelf game engines. All of the big open game engines are heavy and make a ton of decisions for you that will not be optimal for your specific game, because they make generalized decisions necessary to support all kinds of games. This does save you time, and you can absolutely make games that are good enough with them, but it's ridiculous to me to describe making your own engine as wasting time. It's spending time to gain a benefit, which is a trade-off that is worth it for some and not necessary for others.
MonoGame is more like a library than a game engine (a very loaded term nowadays). It's too different from Godot to make a comparison.
You can compare the idea of trying to make a game with a framework versus an engine rather than compare MonoGame and Godot directly.
> wonder how it compares, if at all, with Godot nowadays.
It doesn't. Godot is a 3D game engine and editor. Monogame is more like SDL or Raylib: just a library to make writing games from scratch easier.
What are the capabilities needed for Stardew Valley? Drawing 2d sprites. Playing audio? That's a pretty low bar to reach. MonoGame doesn't even support animated sprites. You have to build support for them yourself. That sounds like a pretty low bar.
I used Monogame back when it was a proprietary framework called XNA developed at Microsoft.
You used to be able to use XNA to build Indie games for the Xbox 360, hard to believe, but this is going on 15 years ago at this point.
I built two indie games and made a couple of hundred bucks back when I was in High School. It's actually what got me into programming in the first place.
I'm happy to see that XNA became Monogame, it's one of the best frameworks I've ever used for gamedev.