31. MonoGame is coming to Xbox One

     

       XNA is not Dead! It lives on through MonoGame, which implements the XNA 4.0 Framework. This allows developers using the XNA dev kit to port their games to other platforms besides the default platforms supported already by the XNA 4.0 Framework. Recently at GDC (the Game Developer's Conference) 2016, in addition to the cross-network play support, Microsoft announced MonoGame is coming to Xbox One. In an older blog post I wrote, I was asking Microsoft to allow their Xbox One dev kit to support MonoGame as well as other tools and middleware.

MonoGame is coming to Xbox One!

— ID@Xbox (@ID_Xbox) March 14, 2016

       The Cyclone Game Engine is built upon the XNA and MonoGame framework, so this is great news for myself as well as Steel Cyclone Studios. Back in 2014 of March, Sony announced that their PS4 dev kits would support MonoGame to registered PS4 developers. Microsoft officially ended support for XNA some time ago, but MonoGame launched an open source implementation of XNA 4.0 in 2009. Since then MonoGame has been used to help create a number of games for many various platforms, including Windows 8, Windows Phone and others. The first Xbox One game made with MonoGame is called Axiom Verge, which is a retro-themed side-scroller. The game was created by just one person, Tom Happ, who also worked at Petroglyph Games. Axiom Verge launched last year on Playstation 4 and Windows PC, and will be released for Xbox One sometime later this year. Congratulations to the MonoGame team! Below is a video by Blit Works released in 2015 showcasing MonoGame samples running on PSVita and Xbox One.


“With nearly every game on the market today being released simultaneously on all platforms, the need for a good cross-platform development strategy is crucially important. Every hour spent reinventing the wheel is an hour wasted. Or to put it another way, every hour spent writing cross-platform code constitutes three saved hours.” 
       --(Steven Goodwin (2005), Cross-Platform Game Programming)