love VS MonoGame

Tho personally I've come to prefer making my games in https://love2d.org and https://tic80.com

Start by making some games imo, unless you already have a good project in mind. https://tic80.com or https://love2d.org

If all goes well with PICO-8, you can "upgrade" to love2d, which like PICO-8 uses Lua programming language, but allows for higher resolutions, and generally more polished outcome.

I have a similar profile, and I have tried many different engines/frameworks/libraries. Some thoughts: - ebiten, written in Go, is a very light game dev lib. I like Go, so writing "my own engine" with it was pretty fun (I have some libs for ebiten here). Mostly 2d. - Love2d is sort of the same thing, but written in C++, and scriptable in Lua. I absolutely love this level of abstraction, and this is probably the one I have been the most productive with (example here). Mostly 2d, but people have done 3d with it too. - Godot has a bright future, at least from my point of view. The 2D workflow is very very fast, much faster than Unity in my experience (you don't spend time waiting for stuff to recompile every time you edit a script, for starters), and they just released v4, which comes with insane improvements in 3D rendering. I have never delved into 3D, but from what I can see, it's on par with what Unity can produce these days. Plus, the founders have created a separate commercial entity to provide support for consoles (called W4games), because the open source licensing attached to Godot is not compatible with the NDAs involved in publishing for consoles - raylib and monogame might be interesting for you if you want to go old-school. They're both inspired by the same framework (XNA) and they work similarly. Also very close to the way Love2d does things, and a comparable level of abstraction. - Unity is slow. I honestly dislike it a lot, just for this reason. There's also a lot of "we've refactored this, and there's no docs yet, but you can also use this other system, and also the legacy one, and that one, or build your own based on these primitives" and it's hard when you're a beginner. If you know what you're doing I guess it's fine, or if you don't care, but as a software engineer, you will probably be like me and try to find the "best" solution to your problem, which is tiring and hard to do with Unity.

Also, a recommendation that is a little more Niche. Lua, and love. love2d.org is a really easy to make games with a relatively simple programming language. Could be fun.

Are you saying she wants the D? Because that's a total brainfuck. I'd much rather believe they merely fell in Löve.

Being a hard worker and having persistence are more important than being intelligent; a lazy genius never accomplishes anything. Try learning programming as its own skill separate from gamedev first. If you're finding C# too difficult, than try a simpler language like Lua. Lua specifically can be used with Love2D to make games.

i read you want to make games. go for 2d games, love https://love2d.org/ or pygame https://www.pygame.org/news or some kind of js engine for webgame https://github.com/collections/javascript-game-engines

Almost everywhere I've worked over the last few years is using Unity, Unreal, or React to develop titles, but I have always enjoyed the lower level no batteries included development style of the XNA framework which was popularized during the Xbox360 era. More recently the framework has been reborn and modernized as MonoGame, while maintaining the same feel and development style.

I have a similar profile, and I have tried many different engines/frameworks/libraries. Some thoughts: - ebiten, written in Go, is a very light game dev lib. I like Go, so writing "my own engine" with it was pretty fun (I have some libs for ebiten here). Mostly 2d. - Love2d is sort of the same thing, but written in C++, and scriptable in Lua. I absolutely love this level of abstraction, and this is probably the one I have been the most productive with (example here). Mostly 2d, but people have done 3d with it too. - Godot has a bright future, at least from my point of view. The 2D workflow is very very fast, much faster than Unity in my experience (you don't spend time waiting for stuff to recompile every time you edit a script, for starters), and they just released v4, which comes with insane improvements in 3D rendering. I have never delved into 3D, but from what I can see, it's on par with what Unity can produce these days. Plus, the founders have created a separate commercial entity to provide support for consoles (called W4games), because the open source licensing attached to Godot is not compatible with the NDAs involved in publishing for consoles - raylib and monogame might be interesting for you if you want to go old-school. They're both inspired by the same framework (XNA) and they work similarly. Also very close to the way Love2d does things, and a comparable level of abstraction. - Unity is slow. I honestly dislike it a lot, just for this reason. There's also a lot of "we've refactored this, and there's no docs yet, but you can also use this other system, and also the legacy one, and that one, or build your own based on these primitives" and it's hard when you're a beginner. If you know what you're doing I guess it's fine, or if you don't care, but as a software engineer, you will probably be like me and try to find the "best" solution to your problem, which is tiring and hard to do with Unity.

If you prefer a framework instead of an engine and editor they do exist, MonoGame is a popular one. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're doing it more as a hobby (in which case it's totally valid to do whatever suits you best), using engines with their editors and scripting languages is the industry standard.

If you want to write everything by hand and you want to work with C# get monogame it will take care of window, ogl/dx intialization for you. You will also gain primitive 2D drawing api. But if you can skip a lot of work by using full game engine like Unity3D or Godot. They will solve low level stuff for you like UI and Input mapping.

Monogame (free)

Mono Game is also a thing, if you're willing to do something like the SFML route, but with C#.

MonoGame is an open-source framework, a thin layer of abstraction over input, sound, and graphics APIs. MonoGame lets game developers write cross platform code that will run on desktop, mobile, and console devices. Many commercially successful indie games have been shipped using MonoGame, and it's similar frameworks XNA and FNA, since 2007. MonoGame is ideal for developers who don't want an engine to dictate their decisions and rather have more control in the development of their game. It has a lot of features for 2D already built-in, but doesn't have the type of features that Unreal or Unity have for 3D out of the box. MonoGame tries to get out of the developer's way by providing only the essentials: input, sound, and drawing to the screen.

The new MonoGame version just got released and the templates have been revised to use implicit global usings. You can read more here: https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame/issues/7848.