Last week, I worked on adding text to my game. I had to do research on how to use text since it isn’t as easy to use as other programs. With MonoGame, you have to upload a font and initialize it before you can write text to the screen. I had a lot of issues with getting the font to work and spent a large chunk of time trying to fix it. Eventually, I discovered my issue was with the game file itself and not my code, which was very frustrating.

My biggest challenge was trying to make the text appear without any errors. The error that I had received was not very informative and I had to spend multiple days googling the error code to figure out my problem. There were multiple forums of people describing the same issues I was having but no solutions seemed to have been found. The solution that I eventually found wound up being unrelated to the issue I was having, but I was desperate to try any solution I could find. It had to do with editing the actual game’s file rather than a piece of code I had written.

The main thing I learned last week was that with MonoGame, it is not always easy to know what your errors mean. Some errors are very descriptive and point you to the exact line(s) having the problem, but other times it is very vague and describes the issue itself and not what is causing it. I learned that sometimes long hours of research are necessary to find a solution, and sometimes in a place that is unexpected.