blah VS MonocleEngineMirror

Then, take a look at this GitHub repo for a tiny (but very complete) 2D game engine: https://github.com/noelfb/blah

back to the question blah is a small game framework by the person who made Celeste, that lacks in some features but is a great starting point.

For 2d there’s blah by noelfb who made Celeste: https://github.com/NoelFB/blah

As an example, see Noel Berry's small engine: https://github.com/NoelFB/blah He's an experienced indie game dev and he has a small framework (engine if you dare calling it) with not that many features, but is a great learning tool if you're starting, and shows that you don't need a big game engine to make good games.

i believe they have a custom framework called monocle, which is for XNA

If you want an engine build on top of Monogame/XNA that works with consoles, there is Monocle (an engine built on top of XNA made by the Celeste team.). The link above leads to a mirror, as for some reason Maddy Thorson no longer exists on bitbucket, where Monocle was originally hosted.

I agree, but Monocle doesn't have graphics stuff, anyways, the bitbucket link is down but here's a mirror

Heres the link to Monocle: shortgecko/MonocleEngineMirror: A 2D open source framework built off of Microsoft XNA, used in games like TowerFall, made by MaddyThorson (github.com)