A Gamer's Introduction to Programming with MonoGame

A Gamer’s Introduction to Programming with MonoGame: Welcome Brave Adventurer! is a great way to combine your current love of both video games and coding into a brand‑new love of writing your own games. In this book, you’ll learn the essential ins‑and‑outs of how to work with fonts and text, images and sprites, audio, and even animation. You’ll learn how to give your players control over their destiny through keyboards, mice, and gamepads, and you’ll harness the never‑ending energy of the gameplay loop functions.

But coding books are technical, boring, and scary, aren’t they? Not this one. Within these pages, you’ll find a fun and approachable adventure that will introduce you to the accessible but powerful MonoGame development framework. Using Visual Studio and C#, you’ll write simple but engaging interactive scenes and games that will gradually build up your coding skills and confidence.

Packed with practical examples, plain‑language explanations, images, and illustrations, this book is structured like a video game, complete with levels to progress through, cutscenes to give you extra information, and final challenge projects to show you how everything fits together and to help build your own creative portfolio. It is also the second book in an ongoing series designed to take you from zero experience to writing your own video games and interactive digital experiences using industry standard languages and tools. For readers with previous object‑oriented programming experience, this book is a standalone introductory MonoGame adventure.

Gain even more experience by exploring the resources, bonus materials, and extensive code samples available at the companion website: https://welcomebraveadventurer.ca.

Now, gather your courage and prepare to level up by joining the MonoGame coding quests that await you inside.

Aaron Langille (PhD) is a public speaker, game player and designer, writer and editor, and award‑winning post‑secondary educator. After teaching computer science for almost two decades, he recently levelled up to teaching video game design. In his current role, Aaron sits joyfully at the intersection of video games, education, visual arts, media, technology, and storytelling.