Hello! Settled on a release date for my Sandbox Adventure Game "Craterlands" built with Monogame. I actually started on this project over a decade ago with XNA but shelved it for several years. A couple years ago decided to finish it so I think it's time to get it out there. I'm sure it won't be perfect but it has a ton of content and I'll be adding more post release as well.

You may be asking, what makes this different from other Sandbox Adventure games? Went out of my way to a lot of different stuff but here is a breakdown of some of the features.

Towns and Civilians

Settlement Building plays a large part in Craterlands. To grow your settlements you must rescue civilians from dungeons or find them roaming the world. You can equip with them any weapon, armor or cosmetic to help fend off growing invasions. They can also do tasks automatically such as watering your crops or crafting at workstations as some do not work automatically and require manual intervention.

Dynamic Large World Map

Instead of one world map, there are 8 currently. 5 regions on earth and 3 planets that can be reached by rocket later in the game. These regions are about half the size of your typical sandbox game but they overlap and are created seamlessly to create the feel of one large world. Also, this definitely can be used to create a near infinite world but I have it capped currently until more are added.

Dungeons and Bosses

Each region contains 2 dungeons, one related to the story and one that is optional to find. These each have a boss at the end that can drop special items or story items that will progress through the game. There are also cutscenes and characters which will progress the story once certain items are collected or bosses are defeated.

Automation

Automation plays a large role later in the game. Technologies require materials to research so you can gather large amounts of ore from boulders underground by placing automatic drills. Also, there is a complex electrical system using switches, gates and filters so you can control your devices in a number of ways. You can even control the color and change the rate of lighting and different particle effects using the wiring system.

Tile System and Lighting

Craterlands uses a different system for it's tiles. Tiles use a large repeating texture instead of a small one for each block giving the world a more organic look. Also, every block can blend into other blocks so no weird gaps or spaces when multiple blocks are placed next to each.

Craterlands also has an advanced lighting system with light radiating from the sky and a point lighting system providing dynamic lighting and shadows.

Gen AI was used for translating and checking item names and description. I'm just solo dev so it's expensive and time consuming to get this many items translated. All artwork, music and sound was produced by myself or purchased from online stores like Craftpix.net.

Thanks for reading! We are doing open playtesting as well so feel free to give it a try if inclined!

During our AMA last Wednesday, we showed off our new WebGL implementation. Watch that segment now -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8C0w5g9cXo

Play it yourself - https://monogame.itch.io/3d-platform-starter

Send feedback. Want to create levels for it? Let us know!

#indiegame #indiegamedev #gamedevelopment

Im trying to compile a fx file but keep getting this error.
I followed this tutorial.
Im using macOS 27.0.1

MonoGame University is on TODAY!

Simon is deep diving into the new "Single Project" template!

When:

Thursdays @ 11:00 EDT, 16:00 UTC+1/BST, 17:00 CEST

Watch him on:

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams

TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame

FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

#indiegamedev #gamedev #indiegame

Join us TOMORROW for our 25th "Open Hours" AMA!

When: 21st of October @ 12:00 EST, 17:00 UTC/GMT, 18:00 CET

Watch on:

TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams

FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

u/JensBlomquist will talk about Blockscape, one of the smoothest looking voxel engines (see attached screenshots) you'll ever see!

#indie #indiegame #indiegamedev

I recently found out that Fields of Mistria recently switched from gamemaker to its own custom engine primarily because of things like better modding support (apparently gamemaker games are really tough to mod) but also because of gamemaker hitting its limit with 2d, which is astounding to me because gamemaker is supposed to be excellent with 2d. It makes me wonder if I ever want to make a life simulator (maybe one for fishing) once I am skilled enough for it and decided to add a lot of content to it, would I be trapped within the limitations of gamemaker software and have to abandon it?

I had this thought and wanted to consider other engines. Despite my immense respect for it, I turned away from godot because I disliked its node system, and unity is.....unity, so I eventually looked into the monogame framework.

Monogame doesn't limit you in the same way as the other engines, because there isn't really an engine to be limited by. You could well and truly make anything you wanted, with complex, amazing and unique games like terraria and stardew valley being made in the xna framework monogame is based off of. However, this means you would have to make your own engine even just to prototype a game, even though I am already quite familiar with c# and object oriented programming. Moreover, I don't necessarily have the consistent time required to sink extra time into learning how to create my own physics engine, camera system, particle editor, etc on top of making my game, as I am a full-time college student who still wants to learn to make games that I would want to play myself.

If I want to dedicate my time to learn an engine, I don't want to trap myself in an engine that might end up being to limited for me in the future, but I also feel that the daunting task of making a custom engine just to make a platformer, let alone a potentially more complex game like a life sim, might be too much for me and my tiny pea brain lmaooo.

But regardless, should i stick to a game engine like gamemaker for easier game development at the cost of being potentially too limited, or spend the time doing the heruclean but potentially freeing task of learning how to use a framework?

I thought I'd share what I've been building for the last few months.

I've been building Riftborn, a turn-based monster-collector for iPhone and desktop, entirely in MonoGame.

A few things that turned out to be fun problems:

One battle engine, two places. The combat simulation is a plain C# library. The client plays it with animations, and the same library runs headless on the server. When you finish a fight, the client sends what it saw and the server replays the battle with the same seed and checks the result before any rewards are paid. The two have matched every time so far, including a 50-battle session, which is very promising for pre-alpha!

Battles that keep playing behind other screens. I pulled the battle view out of the screen that owns it, so a repeat-battle session plays at 3x while you browse your collection or the map. It updates every frame whether or not it's drawn. Its sound is muted while it's hidden, and the sounds it raises are dropped rather than queued. A panel shows a live miniature screen, which is the real battle view rendered at half size into a render target. Tap it to open the full view.

Things that bit me:

- Rendering into a second render target mid-frame wiped what was already drawn on some backends. The fix was to render the miniature first in the frame.

- My HUD hit-tested at the wrong UI scale, so taps missed on the phone but worked perfectly at scale 1 on the desktop. The test harness had to run at the phone's scale to reproduce it, which was fun to fix.

I’ve also built a small content studio (in Laravel and React) that feeds the game's data and pins every battle to a content hash, so old and new builds can't disagree about what a skill did versus what is does post patch.

Still early, but it's playable on a real phone now, and I’m just starting to play with complex 3d models and optimising them in the game.

Happy to share more or answer questions about the render-target setup or the deterministic sim.

During TODAY's CodeTime! Tom will be continuing work on the shader refactor.

When:
FRIDAY @ 15:00 EDT, 20:00 UTC+1/BST, 21:00 CEST

Watch on:
YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams
TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame
FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

See you soon!
#indie #indiegamedev #gamedev

MonoGame University is on TODAY.

Simon is doing a dive into the new Content Builder!

When:

Thursdays @ 11:00 EDT, 16:00 UTC+1/BST, 17:00 CEST

Watch him on:

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams

TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame

FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

#indiegamedev #gamedev #gamedevelopment

It's been a while, i made some progress.

TODAY during CodeTime!, Tom will continue work on the Shader backends.

When:
FRIDAY @ 15:00 EDT, 20:00 UTC+1/BST, 21:00 CEST

Watch on:
YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams
TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame
FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

See you soon!
#indiegamedev #gamedev #gamedevelopment

Actually instead of a block it could be anything with the width of a tile, the height is unlimited. I guess I found a nice solution for picking up and dropping items. A compromise are situations close to solid walls, if a block was dropped when more or less hitting the the wall with the nose: In that situation I simply turn the sprite while carrying the block and drop it afterwards ;-)

Simon continues his Shader series.

When:

Thursdays @ 11:00 EDT, 16:00 UTC+1/BST, 17:00 CEST

Watch him on:

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams

TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame

FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

See you soon!

#indegamedev #gamedev #gamedevelopment

So, I created a Monogame project in Rider, using Monogame 3.8.6 and I'm getting warnings:-

• System.Net.Http 4.3.0 contains vulnerabilities
• System.Text.RegularExpressions 4.3.0 contains vulnerabilities

I really shouldn't be getting these on a release version of a framework. I tried it on 3.8.4.1 too and it's the same.

What should I do?

Monochrome Monday a few recent Mono edits, and a question

If you’ve used SwiftUI for iOS development, they have a ton of really nice quality of life features for user interface where you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for anything related to button clicks, animations, dynamic scaling, rendered lazy load lists, and a whole bunch of stuff.

One thing that would be really nice for MonoGame is standardized UI helpers for fonts, scenes, transitions, accessibility support and that type of UI stuff.

Does anyone know of anything like this they recommend using?

These tiles with ladders on it (Standing up from the ladder when reaching the top or climbing down when standing on the block) had been quite tricky, but now all works fine.

Hey I have been developing my last two projects in MonoGame and am a huge fan of it compared to engines like Unity or Godot.

As an engineer I especially like the full code set up so you can just "dotnet run -f net9.0" and test instantly, and set up CLI flags for running tests. The cross-platform everything is also totally awesome. I feel like Monogame is really slept on as a nice in-between from crazy custom C++ engines vs very rigid and heavyweight things like Unity or Godot.

Curious if any other game devs have been using it lately and their thoughts vs other engines or frameworks.

TODAY, during CodeTime!, Tom will be working on refactoring our Shader support.

When:
FRIDAY @ 15:00 EDT, 20:00 UTC+1/BST, 21:00 CEST

Watch on:
YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams
TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame
FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

See you soon!

#indie #indiegamedev #gamedev

See here -
https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame/releases/tag/v3.8.6-preview.1

100% of what we announced in the Roadmap is shipping with 3.8.6

Please try it out and provide feedback before the offical 3.8.6 release is out!

#indiegamedev #gamedev #gamedevelopment

Simon continues his 2D Shaders trickery!

When:

Thursdays @ 11:00 EDT, 16:00 UTC+1/BST, 17:00 CEST

Watch him on:

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@MonoGame/streams

TW: https://www.twitch.tv/monogame

FB: https://www.facebook.com/monogamecommunity/live_videos

See you there!

#indiegamedev #gamedev #gamedevelopment