Gravitas updated to .NET 10 and MonoGame 3.8.5

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Gravitas is a gravity-simulating space game I originally released on Xbox Live Indie Games, and developed using XNA.

Nearly six years ago I spent a few hours porting the game to MonoGame, but never took it further.

I recently decided to try and revive it, again. This time it took less than an hour to update it to MonoGame 3.8.5 and .NET 10.

As a small aside, my day job is mainly as an iOS developer. I’ve spent a lot of time working on CI and doing a lot of work to optimize the build time. Every job I’ve done that has involved mobile development has had problems with slow build times - that’s why things like hot reload and previews are so important.

A clean build of Gravitas on my Mac takes just two seconds.

Things to do

Before I can actually release it, there are some things I need to do.

Some issues are either because of the XNA to MonoGame porting, or just evolution in MonoGame:

  • Broken match options screen.
  • Weird duplicate UI in game.

Some issues that were in the original release that I always wanted to deal with:

  • Camera zooms in and out too quickly.
  • Some text hangs off the screen.
  • Some scoring glitches - you can get a double kill when the second kill is a suicide.

There are practical considerations about releasing it on more than just an Xbox:

  • Fix keyboard control.
  • Implement touch control.
  • Where to actually release it?

I also need to use some better fonts.

This has also been cross-posted on OliverBrown.me.uk.