Jarred Capellman and Louis Salin

MonoGame Mastery

Build a Multi-Platform 2D Game and Reusable Game Engine

1st ed.
Jarred Capellman
Cedar Park, TX, USA
Louis Salin
Cedar Park, TX, USA
ISBN 978-1-4842-6308-2e-ISBN 978-1-4842-6309-9
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6309-9
© Jarred Capellman, Louis Salin 2020
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To my wife, Amy, for always supporting me through thick and thin.

—Jarred Capellman

To my kids, in the hope that they pursue their dreams.

—Louis Salin

Introduction

Building video games has an undeniable appeal in the imagination of many people coming from various backgrounds. Many children want to be game designers when they grow up and many programmers have learned the art of writing code thinking that they would, one day, create their own game.

Creating a video game is both an expressive art form and a series of logical challenges that must be solved. A game programmer needs to be creative while materializing the content of their imagination on a computer monitor, and at the same time, they must constantly solve the many physical constraints placed upon them as they shape their game. For those of us that enjoy solving problems and have a penchant for art, this is a dream field, whether as a hobby or, professionally, as a full-time job.

There has never been a better time for regular people than today to write video games! While hobbyists around the world have built games since the 1970s, the amount of deep technical knowledge required has diminished and the barrier of entry has dropped much lower in the last few years. Game tooling and game engines now abstract away the complexities of getting something drawn on a screen, while computers have gotten so powerful that programmers do not have to be so precise anymore in the way they handle memory management and the game performance. Furthermore, getting a video game published on gaming consoles and computers has become much more accessible today to anyone with the perseverance to bring their game to completion, as can be seen with the sheer number of indie games found on the market.

Software developers today have a wide array of technologies to choose from when building their game. One of these choices is MonoGame, a framework for creating powerful cross-platform games.

In this book, we aim to take experienced C# programmers through a journey as we explain game development basics and build a small two-dimensional vertical shooter video game from scratch, using MonoGame as our framework. By the end of this book, our readers will not only have built a reusable game engine that they will be able to use in their future games, but they will also have gained valuable knowledge to give them a leg up in their future projects, whatever framework or engine they decide to use.

Acknowledgments
There were two big drivers for bringing me to focus my career on programming. The first being my father who handed me a QBasic book when I was 9 years old. He supported my passion for programming throughout my childhood, buying books and updated versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++ every release. The other was John Carmack. When I first played Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, I was mesmerized at how immersive the game was. A few years later seeing John Carmack on the cover of the Wired magazine, reading how he and John Romero had created and transformed the first-person-shooter genre, I knew I wanted to achieve that level of impact in my career.

—Jarred Capellman

Many events in my life brought me to this point, where I get to thank the people who have helped me and believed in me. My father bought me my first computer and enrolled me in a Basic class in sixth grade, where I learned how to draw lines and circles on the screen.

Years later, Richard Egli, my computer graphics professor in college, brought me to my first SIGGRAPH conference where I learned how deep the rabbit hole goes. Thank you for believing in me.

Finally, I’d like to thank Jarred, my coauthor, for giving me a chance to help him write this very book.

—Louis Salin

Table of Contents
Chapter 1:​ Introduction 1
Who This Book Is For?​ 2
What This Book Is Not 2
Reader Assumptions 3
What Is MonoGame 4
MonoGame Compared to Engines 6
Game Types Best Suited for MonoGame 6
Vertical Shooters 7
Horizontal Shooters 8
Side Scrollers 10
Role Playing 11
Puzzle 12
Strategy 13
Organization of This Book 14
Code Samples 15
Summary 16
Chapter 2:​ Configuring the Dev Environment 17
Development Environment Configuration 18
Platform Agnostic 18
Set Up Your Windows Development Environment 18
Set Up Your macOS Development Environment 22
Set Up Your Linux Development Environment 27
Additional Tooling 28
Tools 29
Visual Studio Extensions 32
Summary 34
Chapter 3:​ MonoGame Architecture 35
MonoGame Architecture 35
Pipeline App 35
Game Class 38
Your First Rendered Pixels 40
Creating the Solution and Project 40
Diving into the Project 43
Diving into MainGame.​cs 45
Execution Order 49
Summary 50
Chapter 4:​ Planning Your Game Engine 51
Game Engine Design 51
Player Input 52
Artificial Intelligence (AI) 53
Event Triggers 53
Graphical Rendering 53
Sound Rendering 54
Physics 54
State Management 54
Implementing the Architecture of the Engine 58
Creating the Project 58
Creating the State Classes 59
Creating the Scaler and Window Management 62
Event System 71
Summary 74
Chapter 5:​ Asset Pipeline 75
MonoGame Asset Pipeline 75
ContentManager Class 76
MonoGame Pipeline Tool 78
Integrate the Asset Pipeline into the Engine 79
BaseGameState 79
MainGame 81
Add a Player Sprite to the Game 82
Reviewing the New Assets 83
Adding the New Assets to Our Content 85
Game Code Changes 89
Running the Application 91
Summary 93
Chapter 6:​ Input 95
Discussing the Various Input Mechanisms 96
Keyboard State 96
Mouse State 100
Gamepad State 101
Scrolling Background 103
Creating a Generic Input Manager 111
Shooting Bullets 118
Summary 123
Chapter 7:​ Audio 125
Refactoring the Engine 125
Code Organization 131
Audio 133
Playing a Soundtrack 135
Sound Effects 140
Summary 145
Chapter 8:​ Particles 147
Anatomy of a Particle 149
Learning with an Online Particle Editor 150
Different Shapes of Particle Emitters 152
Adding a Particle System to Our Game 153
Particle 154
EmitterParticleS​tate 159
IEmitterType 163
ConeEmitterType 164
Emitter 166
Adding a Missile and Smoke Trail to Our Game 172
Creating a Dev Game State to Play With 172
Adding the Missile Game Object to Our Game 184
Summary 189
Chapter 9:​ Collision Detection 191
Techniques 193
AABB (Axis Aligned Bounding Box) 195
OBB (Oriented Bounding Box) 196
Spheres 198
Uniform Grids 199
Quadtrees 200
Other Techniques 203
Adding Enemies to Our Game 203
Rotating Our Chopper 206
Spinning Blades 208
Making the Choppers Move 209
Adding an Explosion Particle Engine 216
Adding Collision Detection 219
Bounding Boxes 220
AABB Collision Detection 229
Summary 234
Chapter 10:​ Animations and Text 237
A Bit of Refactoring 238
Animations 242
Sprite Sheets 242
Texture Atlas 244
Animation Downsides 245
State Machines 246
Animation Engine 248
Animating Our Fighter Plane 255
Text 262
Fonts 262
Adding Fonts to the Content Pipeline 263
Fonts As Game Objects 264
Tracking Lives 266
Game Over 267
Summary 270
Chapter 11:​ Level Design 271
Level Editors 272
What Is a Level?​ 273
Level Events 275
Level Readers, Levels, and Our Gameplay State 277
Adding Turrets 286
Game Art and Origins 287
Turret Bullets 299
Collision Detection 306
Cleaning Up 311
Adding Text 311
Reviewing Our Level Design 312
Improving the Gameplay 313
Summary 315
Index 317
About the Authors
Jarred Capellman
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has been professionally developing software for over 14 years and is Director of Engineering at SparkCognition in Austin, Texas. He started making QBasic text–based games when he was 9 years old. He learned C++ a few years later before studying OpenGL with the eventual goal of entering the gaming industry. Though his goal of professionally developing games didn’t come to fruition, he continued deep diving into frameworks such as MonoGame, Vulkan, and DirectX as an important part of his free time. When not programming, he enjoys writing music and is working on his DSc in Cybersecurity, focusing on applying machine learning to security threats.

 
Louis Salin
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has been a developer for more than 15 years in a wide variety of fields, developing on Windows in the early days in C, C++, and eventually C# before working as a developer on Linux-based web applications using different scripting languages, such as Ruby and Python. His early love for coding comes from all the time he spent as a kid copying video games written in Basic from books borrowed from the library. He wrote his first game in high school and took many classes in computer graphics.

 
About the Technical Reviewer
Simon Jackson
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is a long-time software engineer and architect with many years of Unity game development experience, as well as an author of several Unity game development titles. He loves to both create Unity projects and lend a hand to help educate others, whether it’s via a blog, vlog, user group, or major speaking event.

His primary focus at the moment is with the XRTK (Mixed Reality Toolkit) project; this is aimed at building a cross-platform Mixed Reality framework to enable both VR and AR developers to build efficient solutions in Unity and then build/distribute them to as many platforms as possible.

 
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