Picking a framework, among other things

2025-11-27

Hello again! From Oliver.

Just updating this thing to keep some history. Turns out, picking a game engine/framework is harder than I thought. Although I'm pretty sure that's just me being indecisive. I've decided on using MonoGame. Seems like it has a rather large community. I've opted to stay away from game engines, for two main reasons.

1. I want to maintain more control over the internals, like rendering and the sort.
2. I feel like it would be fun to spend time on programming the lower level stuff. I do enjoy programming by itself, so it feels right to use a framework instead of an engine.

I also considered using libGDX, but it has a smaller community and I recall Anuken (the creator of Mindustry) mentioning that he would discourage anyone from making games in Java. So there's that.

Aside from programming, I've also been spending some time developing the lore and story of the game. My current approach is throwing my entire story in chronological order at a document and reorganizing it later for presenting it to the player. I'm only about 80% sure that I got this from an author's blog, but it does makes sense on paper.

Anyhow, there's a short update to keep things somewhat consistent. See you next time!