MonoGame: A .NET framework for making cross-platform games (github.com)

For a more actively maintained XNA implementation, also worth looking at Ethan Lee's FNA: https://fna-xna.github.io/

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.

If you are wondering about the capabilities, Stardew Valley was made in MonoGame.

I wonder how it compares, if at all, with Godot nowadays.

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/

Also check out Stride3d https://github.com/stride3d/stride, which is a more full featured engine built on (i believe) Monogame. Runs on .net 10

If Microsoft hadn't killed XNA (what MonoGame is based on) a decade ago, they could be packaging it with Copilot right now as the ideal code-first AI-assisted game engine. Easy to use, easy to test, no visual editor where AI will struggle like with Unity/Unreal/Godot.

What would be a direct equivalent in C++?

This is a weird coincidence.

Yesterday I looked into Monogame, FNA and Raylib. Just always surprises me how reading something somewhere makes people do similar things.

Java equivalent: https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx

We used Monogame at a previous company and it's a nightmare to be productive in it. The lack of any kind of an editor makes any kind of dev a nightmare: 3d adjustments? Good luck, guess it.. UI adjustments: good luck, try it 300 times until you get it right.

Switched to Unity, best choice ever.

I’m old enough to remember and toy with the now long-dead XNA. It was lots of fun, and gave a lot of us students versed with C# a sort of first-hand exposure with the .NET. If only (the old) Microsoft wasn’t so stupid, short-sighted, and selfish at the time.

OpenBSD ran tons of MonoGame indie games thanks to it, it even had a wrapper in ports.

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I built a full WinUI app with no visual editor, just XAML and code. The layout was entirely in my head. Now I do the same with terminal UIs on Linux, pure code with fluent builders. Once you internalize the layout model, a visual editor mostly slows you down. Code-first gives you full control, clean diffs, and composability. That said, for complex layouts you still need to run and visually review, no one gets nested grids pixel-perfect from memory alone.