It is my last day off for the holiday season. I didn’t have anything planned, so I decided to work on tutorial 02 in my MonoGame tutorial series, A Summoner’s Tale. I have published that tutorial on Google Drive. Unlike what I planned, this tutorial does a bit of rendering. I implemented the tile engine and rendered a test map. There is still a lot of plumbing to do. However, generating maps is an integral part of this style of game. For that reason, I went ahead and implemented it now. It is a multilayer tile engine, four layers, to be precise. In future tutorials, I will be adding other types of layers. For now, it is functional and renders the map efficiently. I didn’t cover scrolling the map in this tutorial. I will get to that in a future tutorial. Here is the link to the tutorial. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mMryn3iMUSY1HcFP3UbIyxk0Cl00HI54/view?usp=share_link

What’s Next?

I will work on the third tutorial on making a Pokemon-style game with MonoGame. That tutorial will go back to adding more plumbing to the game. I want to implement an input manager that I use, Xin. The only thing is that it is gianormous. So I might end up implementing a stripped-down version of it instead. A thought just occurred to me. I might add it to the project with a link to download it and skip explaining it altogether. Or explain a few of the critical methods. I like that idea.

My Projects

I took a break from my projects for the past two days to work on tutorials. I think that I will resume working on Shadow Monsters tomorrow or later this evening. It is more related to my tutorials, but I think I will create an image for A Summoner’s Tale page and title screen. It’s been a while since I did some graphic design. Back to Shadow Monsters, I will be working on combat between shadow monsters because it is such an essential part of the game. Also, I want to use animated sprites instead of static images. I have a lot of the plumbing in place already. It is a matter of bringing it all together.

Final Thoughts

With the day off, I decided it was a good idea to work on a tutorial rather than just my project. It feels so good to be writing tutorials again. It is something that has been missing in my life. So I plan to write once a week, at least. Depending on work, I might do more. That is it for today. I wish you great adventures with game programming.
Cynthia