I've been meaning to try this out and leave some feedback ever since our mutual friend shared your itch page with me. Sorry, it took so long!
I definitely get not having enough time to fully realize a game for jam. I tried entering a jam earlier this year and ended up not submitting because I severely underestimated what I needed to get done for it. Good work never the less!
Before this, I had never heard of MonoGame before. If you tried Unity, how does it compare? Unity is basically all I know myself (and by extension C#). I tried Godot for about a week before switching.
Oh, and in my own head canon for the game, I imagined that John was beating up clones of himself. So the John theme was complete John fighting Johns in the John. Looking forward to seeing what else you come up with when you find the time!
Thanks for checking it out! It is incredibly simple and I was really pressed for time and really rusty with XNA/MonoGame when I signed up for this. I've spent so much time in the past making very large complicated games and never finishing them. So I figured I'd try and actually finish some smaller projects and publish them. Having a game jam deadline was good for that, but I had to scale it way back to get it finished.
To the question about MonoGame, it is quite a bit different from Unity, but is also a great way to build games using C# (I may be biased though as I am a contributor who helps work on it now) . Unity is a full featured commercially viable game engine, while MonoGame is an Open Source low-level game development framework. It is a re-implementation of Microsoft's XNA game framework from the 2000s that they ended support for in 2013. Basically, MonoGame is a programmer first way of making games without an editor or pre-built engine. You build the game engine yourself and can either create it all in code, make your own editor, or use a third party editor like Tiled or Ldtk and integrate it with your game code. MonoGame is an abstraction layer that sits above the underlying graphics and input APIs like SDL/Open GL and DirectX. It gives you a way to manage frames (Update just like in Unity), and a way to draw every frame as well (SpriteBatch). There is also a built in content pipeline for loading and working with your assets, and a useful Math library that is optimized for use in games. I work as a programmer in my day job and C# is one of my more proficient languages, so it's a good fit for me. It means I spend less time learning how to use the Editor and more time just building what I want to build. It has some downsides though like it is much harder to get started with, and you literally have to build everything so it's not for everybody! I started doing some hobbyist game dev with XNA back when I was in High School and College, and then I switched to Unity when Microsoft ended support for XNA in 2013. I've spent the last few years using Unity to build a bunch of complicated 3D games with low-poly assets that I never finished or released. Finally decided last year to go back to my roots, get a bit more serious, do simpler 2D games, and push myself to finish somethings. Making myself publish them whether I think they're good enough or not.
I have some more interesting games in the works and one of them (albeit a simple puzzle game) should be releasing soon (finishing up some of the final music and artwork for it). The puzzle game takes some of the learnings I had from this like adding a shader, full screen capability, and using better techniques to scale pixel art assets. In it I challenged myself to create something where I did all of the artwork, music, and of course built the game-engine, whereas this game I did a mix of off the shelf stuff and some of my own work. So it will be simple too, but I learned a lot from it (like how bad I really am at art, and how I should rely on others for that lol). And I've already started the next two games I'll be making after that. Both also pushing me to do some things I haven't done yet, or that I want to learn more about.
MonoGame sounds neat...and also something completely out of my wheelhouse. I think I'm a pretty horrible programmer. Honestly, it's one of the reasons why I decided on Unity over Godot because I knew I would be able to find a lot more resources/tutorials to help me learn. Basically, anything I know has all been self-taught through a few online courses, YT videos, and good ol' trial and error. Oh, and documentation when I can actual make heads or tails of it haha.
Looking forward to seeing your new game then! I sorta fell along the same line of thinking this year in that I wanted to start trying to make my own art. So, I've been getting into using Aseprite for pixel art. I never really considered myself an artist and my stuff has a long way to go but I like the process and find that some of my stuff doesn't look all that bad. I would really like to learn how to make my own music as well but figured that will be a skill I attempt at another time. Only so many hours in the day after all.
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I've been meaning to try this out and leave some feedback ever since our mutual friend shared your itch page with me. Sorry, it took so long!
I definitely get not having enough time to fully realize a game for jam. I tried entering a jam earlier this year and ended up not submitting because I severely underestimated what I needed to get done for it. Good work never the less!
Before this, I had never heard of MonoGame before. If you tried Unity, how does it compare? Unity is basically all I know myself (and by extension C#). I tried Godot for about a week before switching.
Oh, and in my own head canon for the game, I imagined that John was beating up clones of himself. So the John theme was complete John fighting Johns in the John. Looking forward to seeing what else you come up with when you find the time!
Thanks for checking it out! It is incredibly simple and I was really pressed for time and really rusty with XNA/MonoGame when I signed up for this. I've spent so much time in the past making very large complicated games and never finishing them. So I figured I'd try and actually finish some smaller projects and publish them. Having a game jam deadline was good for that, but I had to scale it way back to get it finished.
To the question about MonoGame, it is quite a bit different from Unity, but is also a great way to build games using C# (I may be biased though as I am a contributor who helps work on it now) . Unity is a full featured commercially viable game engine, while MonoGame is an Open Source low-level game development framework. It is a re-implementation of Microsoft's XNA game framework from the 2000s that they ended support for in 2013. Basically, MonoGame is a programmer first way of making games without an editor or pre-built engine. You build the game engine yourself and can either create it all in code, make your own editor, or use a third party editor like Tiled or Ldtk and integrate it with your game code. MonoGame is an abstraction layer that sits above the underlying graphics and input APIs like SDL/Open GL and DirectX. It gives you a way to manage frames (Update just like in Unity), and a way to draw every frame as well (SpriteBatch). There is also a built in content pipeline for loading and working with your assets, and a useful Math library that is optimized for use in games. I work as a programmer in my day job and C# is one of my more proficient languages, so it's a good fit for me. It means I spend less time learning how to use the Editor and more time just building what I want to build. It has some downsides though like it is much harder to get started with, and you literally have to build everything so it's not for everybody! I started doing some hobbyist game dev with XNA back when I was in High School and College, and then I switched to Unity when Microsoft ended support for XNA in 2013. I've spent the last few years using Unity to build a bunch of complicated 3D games with low-poly assets that I never finished or released. Finally decided last year to go back to my roots, get a bit more serious, do simpler 2D games, and push myself to finish somethings. Making myself publish them whether I think they're good enough or not.
I have some more interesting games in the works and one of them (albeit a simple puzzle game) should be releasing soon (finishing up some of the final music and artwork for it). The puzzle game takes some of the learnings I had from this like adding a shader, full screen capability, and using better techniques to scale pixel art assets. In it I challenged myself to create something where I did all of the artwork, music, and of course built the game-engine, whereas this game I did a mix of off the shelf stuff and some of my own work. So it will be simple too, but I learned a lot from it (like how bad I really am at art, and how I should rely on others for that lol). And I've already started the next two games I'll be making after that. Both also pushing me to do some things I haven't done yet, or that I want to learn more about.
MonoGame sounds neat...and also something completely out of my wheelhouse. I think I'm a pretty horrible programmer. Honestly, it's one of the reasons why I decided on Unity over Godot because I knew I would be able to find a lot more resources/tutorials to help me learn. Basically, anything I know has all been self-taught through a few online courses, YT videos, and good ol' trial and error. Oh, and documentation when I can actual make heads or tails of it haha.
Looking forward to seeing your new game then! I sorta fell along the same line of thinking this year in that I wanted to start trying to make my own art. So, I've been getting into using Aseprite for pixel art. I never really considered myself an artist and my stuff has a long way to go but I like the process and find that some of my stuff doesn't look all that bad. I would really like to learn how to make my own music as well but figured that will be a skill I attempt at another time. Only so many hours in the day after all.