Game Series: Developing with MonoGame

Join me in creating a homage to the great RPGs of the SNES era, like Final Fantasy VI and Secret of Mana! I'm building a game, engine up, and this series documents my thought processes. Some posts almost read like a tutorial, others is just me rambling about related technology.

As of the time of writing, the series covers my project setup, some diagnostic code, content management, basic game logic, as well as world rendering and animation. I'm currently working on the rather minimal collision engine.

• Preparations
• Setting up the workspace
• Integrating System.Diagnostics: Logging
• Integrating System.Diagnostics: Profiling
• Integrating System.Diagnostics: Instrumenting
• Content Management
• Design Questions
• Integrating System.Configuration
• Save Game Serialization
• Assets and Localization
• Game Logic
• The Game State Machine
• Self-Imposed Restrictions: Examining the GBA and SNES
• Mapping Input to a Virtual Controller
• Keeping Time with a Game Clock
• Self-Imposed Restrictions: The Sound of a Generation
• Rendering
• Tile Maps: How to Represent a World
• Tile Maps: I'll Show You The World
• Matrix Transformations in 2D Space - The Camera
• Handling Multiple Resolutions with a Virtual Screen
• Matrix Transformations in Color Space
• Map Objects: Designing the Entity System
• Map Objects: Rendering and Animating Sprites
• Collision
• The Character Controller: Entity Collision Testing
• The Character Controller: Tile Map Collisions, Part 1
• The Character Controller: Tile Map Collisions, Part 2

This project has also spawned a few side projects:

• Emulating the GBA's Display with Gamma Correction: This is a proof of concept, emulating an old display with no backlight.
• ABDUCT: This was intended to be a rather elaborate sound asset processing tool, simulating authentic SNES sound, but patents on the compression method used kept me from finishing this.
• IMPALE: This is a small utility script I wrote in F# that helped me do a detailed analysis of the color palette in a game that I think looks great.