RiemersArchiveOverview
Welcome to the archive of Riemer's XNA Tutorials, which have been updated and Migrated to MonoGame. On these pages, you can find everything you need to start programming your own games in MonoGame! The Tutorials aim to kickstart your MonoGame development journey in the shortest possible time. If you have some basic programming experience, whether it be using C#, Microsoft Visual Basic or Java, you will have no problems to start coding your MonoGame project right away. All the software you need to start writing your MonoGame application is completely free! On the first page of Series 1, you can find the details for how you can get access to MonoGame and the free tools provided by Microsoft to get you up and running (in some cases all you need is a text editor :D ).
The MonoGame Tutorials are presented in a series of tutorials. Instead of writing small stand-alone chapters, I've opted to introduce you to the various MonoGame concepts one at a time, and gradually integrate the new concepts into our project as we move on. This way, you can see a real-world example in practice of all the features explained in the chapters.
At this moment, you will find five series of Riemer's Tutorials on this site: one series on 2D game programming and four series on 3D game programming.
Let me show you the final screens of the 5 projects we create during the Tutorials:
 2D Series 1: Shooters! | |
 3D Series 1: Terrain |
 3D Series 2: Flightsim |
 3D Series 3: HLSL Intro |
 3D Series 4: Advanced Terrain |
If you are interested in beginning game programming in MonoGame, you can start with the 2D series. In this series, you will learn enough techniques to create almost any 2D game you can think of! This is a screenshot of the game we will create in this series:
If you are ready for some 3D programming, you should give the first Series of 3D programming a try. In this first Series of 3D programming, you will create a true three-dimensional landscape. Linking to your graphics card, drawing a few triangles, and lighting basics will be introduced here.
In this second series of 3D MonoGame Tutorials, you will learn how to create a complete flight simulator! This will include flying your aircraft in a true 3D city and firing bullets at objects! Including some basic collision detection, this series already contains enough content to write your own 3D game!!
In the 3rd Series of 3D MonoGame Tutorials, we will start exploring Shaders. Shaders are used to improve the visual quality of the displayed image.
I recommend you start with the first 2 3D Tutorials before moving on to this more advanced Series.
As a final goal to demonstrate the strength of shaders, I have chosen my example of real lighting. Our scene is lit by light and all objects cast real shadows. Series 3 is used to show you how you can master some of the power inside your NVidia or AMD graphics board.
Taking these tutorials to the next level in this fourth Series of 3D MonoGame Tutorials, we will see some more advanced techniques that will allow us to create a real 3D world that you can use as a start for your own game. Multitexturing and reflective water are just a few of the techniques covered.
Since this Series relies heavily on HLSL and 3D programming, I recommend completing the first three tutorials in 3D Series prior to attempting this tutorial (unless you are already well versed).
There are also a set of additional educational reference resources for understanding Matrices and generating normals which can be found here:
- Automatically generating normals
- Matrices and DirectX
- The maths behind Matrices
- Homogeneous matrices
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If you find an XNA / MonoGame article that is worth preserving, be sure to drop us an Issue and let us know where to get it as we'll grab it as soon as we can.
