Oh, I could get behind doing this more, writing these actually feels somewhat natural. This format is nice! I feel like I'm at least writing something meaningful.

• blog: even more design changes! Mostly to the overview page, I added icons to the post information and added an additional bit for an estimated reading time because why not. I also managed to get partial post markup working, so I increased the size of previews and changed each page to display 4 posts at once.
• gamedev: the browser client for 'Untitled' is making good progress! In the space of 2 days I've ported all chat functionality and am now working on (probably placeholder) art and town generation server-side. Expect to see a bit shortly on some pixel art! The interface has been reworked to be in portrait orientation for phones and work entirely with one hand, more on that later too.

This article was written in collaboration between myself, Daniel Ward, Finlay Brooker, Jimi Westerholm, and Igors Bogdanovs for an assignment. This is merely the hosting grounds!

All code examples are for C# with MonoGame. A .zip file is provided at the end of this article with a complete demonstration. The examples given in this article require a basic understanding of C#.

How do Typical Development Paradigms Fit?

When it comes to game development, it can be a bit harder for somebody who primarily focuses on application development to fully transfer their knowledge. With the inclusion of repeating logic centering around game loops, it may not come first nature to know how to write code that isn't so hopelessly bug-prone.

incidentally, I took the sail image from Wikipedia Commons...hey, it's free-to-use!

It's just like Animal Crossing...what's the problem? But then we remember that this is an online game, so I'll have to turn my thinking around anyway...

Online Play

It's no secret that the bulk of the issues with online games can be attributed to players: moderation is subjective and good moderation is expensive; there will always be loopholes or uncooperative users, even if the game itself is completely morally sound, there will be at least 1 player to make it otherwise. It goes without saying that there needs to be a comprehensive and clear set of rules and a clear reporting system in-game.

Finding the Solution to a Consistent Gripe

There are a lot of things to love with MonoGame (and by extension, C#). Interfacing is not one of them. By that, I mean, there is absolutely nothing that MonoGame provides to deal with it, you must make use of an interfacing library or roll your own code...except, there are actually very few interfacing libraries for C# and the ones that do exist are either needlessly complex or completely lacking (but odd design choices make them difficult to extend to your needs).

For some time, I found relative success with Squid, a blackbox library where you provide the rendering implementation and gave it inputs and it would take care of the logic, and it sortof worked, but I met 2 issues: