So I’m Kinaetron. I’ve been developing games for an embarrsinginly long time and I’ve been ranting and raving about the total lack of written articles about game development for a good while now, so here I am actually writing stuff down.

For the time being I want to write about game development projects I’ve been doing with a game dev framework called Moonworks.

So what is Moonworks ? It’s a fairly low level game development framework that I’ve been playing around for the last few months you can read up the details about it here. I found out about while playing Samurai Gunn 2, a game developed by one of my favourite indie game developers Beau Blyth (Teknopants). Moonworks is being used to develop the new version of Samurai Gunn 2, the current one up on steam was made in Game Maker Studio.

So why didn’t I go down the typical path of using Unity ?

  • Fully featured game engines like that are usually developed by large public traded companies and large publicy companies put their shareholders above their consumer base. I’ve had this play out to myself before with the discontinuation of XNA and watched it happen with the Flash.

Ok so why not Godot, It’s open source and a lot of people using it say it’s great.

  • I exclusively develop 2D games and typically to make a good 2D game, especially an action game you’ll want complete control of the physics and collision detection and from my experience game engines get more in the way than help. Plus I’m way more conformtable and familar with making 2D games from a lower level library

Ok what about FNA then ? Pretty much meets your standards and it has some specific functionality to draw sprites on screen.

  • At the creators own admission, FNA is a preservation project first and foremost and generally advises against making brand new games in FNA. It’s built to replicate XNA for both the good and bad.

So yeah I went with Moonworks it’s a nice modern Framework written in C# a language I like and familar with. It’s being used in game types I typically like to develop myself (2D action games).

Look forward to way more articles about Moonworks and the games I develop in it.