MonoGame Tutorials

MonoGame is a lightweight, cross-platform, unopinionated game engine for C#. MonoGame is an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s now-retired XNA, and they’ve stuck extremely close to what XNA was, while also being able to run almost anywhere.

That “unopinionated” thing is, perhaps, the most important aspect of MonoGame, and drives much of what MonoGame is. On one hand, it doesn’t pigeonhole you into doing anything a certain way, which is a refreshing contrast to other game engines. You can build things the way that you want or the way that makes the most sense for your game.

On the other hand, the decision to be unopinionated means there’s more you must write yourself. As an example, there is no built-in physics engine, nor UI library. Still, there are lots of libraries out there for doing both in MonoGame, and if you feel they’re a good fit for what you’re doing, you can bring them along for the ride. If you don’t find anything you like, you can build your own.

These tutorials are being ported from the XNA tutorials, but they have not all been ported. When you get done with the tutorials here, you might consider jumping over to those and reading them to flesh out some extra details.

• Getting Started
  15 Oct 2021

  Getting Started with MonoGame Before you get started, there are a few things you will need to know and do, which we cover in these four tutorials. These tutorials explain a little bit about what MonoGame is, how to install the necessary (free) software to use MonoGame, and how to do some of the basic things in in. Once you have been through these few tutorials, you will be able to go on to just about anything that you want, though I recommend going to the 2D tutorials next, and then the 3D tutorials, and pick up the rest of the tutorials as you need them.

• 2D Tutorials
  20 Oct 2021

  These tutorials cover the basics of doing 2D stuff, like drawing text and images, as well as 2D animation, and some fancy effects in 2D. After you have completed these tutorials, you should be able to make some pretty interesting 2D games with MonoGame.

• Advanced Tutorials
  20 Oct 2021

  Once you have completed the stuff in the 2D and 3D tutorial categories, you might want to look at this set of tutorials, which discuss some of the more advanced topics in MonoGame that aren’t covered in one of the other categories.