MonoGame at the Global Game Jam Briefing

Another day, another room full of smiling faces. Or something.

You can excuse the audience for looking a bit shell shocked. They had just sat through a whole bunch of game development stuff. I started proceedings, with a fifteen minute section that I retrospectively titled “Watching Rob fail to get his tablet to work in lots of different ways”. After I got a picture on the screen and a keyboard and mouse that worked (something that turned out to be surprisingly difficult and worthy of a blog post all to itself) I did some stuff about how easy it is to get MonoGamae working Windows 8. You can find my slides and sample code here.

Then it was the turn of Simon to talk about good practice for game development and creating sprite sheets. Before this talk we had engaged in a game of “PowerPoint Chicken”. The game is very simple, the one who is the latest to have their slides ready for a presentation wins. I thought I was in with a good chance of winning, what with having my slides ready less than five minutes before the talk. Of course this left me no time to test my tablet, hence the pain at the start, Simon beat me easily, I think he was writing his deck while I was speaking. Which is probably cheating. Anyhoo, it all passed off well enough, with plenty of failing demos to keep the audience amused.

A word from the wise here, PowerPoint chicken is a dangerous game.

Finally Louis, one of our students, turned up and gave the best presentation of the day all about Unity. I’m really going to spend some quality time with this framework, it looks excellent. I’ll put slides and sample code from the other presentations later on.

Now it is full steam ahead for Global Game Jam Hull. We have over 100 folks registered, a bus full of folks coming over from Grimsby, a load of our students. And some games to make.

Comments

[Jules]

MonoGame is really great, I used it to port my WP7 game Tank Rage to Tank Frenzy onto Android Tablets Google. When I can afford a W8 Tablet, I will look at porting into W8 Mrketplace.
I have been looking at Unity to save me some work. Unfortunately we still end up in the same space, that developing great (3D) games, becomes reliant upon good 3D Modelling and artwork. I am a interim Game developer, but a really useless 3D modelling or Games artwork. Unity great game platform, but need to feed it with lots of great 3D Modelling content :(