What is a Scene?

Most people reading this are probably familiar with the videogame Super Mario Bros. When you first start that game, the first thing the player is shown is the Title screen. From here, you can choose 1 Player Game to start the game, which then presents the player with an informative screen showing World #-# and the number of lives remaining. After a second, you're finally presented with the first level of the game.

Each of of these screens that the player see has a cleared and defined purpose for the visuals that it presents and the controls it gives the player. These screens are what we are going to call scenes. Scenes are not a new concept to game development. Many game engines, such as Unity, implement Scenes at their core.

Defining a Scene

In MonoGame, the default Game1 class that we are given when creating a new project can be thought of as a scene. And this works great when we are prototyping or making something on a super small scale. Keeping all of our code in Game1 however isn't very scalable.

Since Game1 is like a scene, we can use it as a foundation for defining the structure of our Scene class. A few concept we'll borrow from it will be

• A Initialize() method that can initialize our scene.
• A LoadContent() method where we can load all of scene specific content.
• A UnloadContent() method where we can unload and dispose of any content no longer needed when the scene is no longer in use.
• A Update() method so we can update the scene each frame.
• A Draw() method so we can draw the scene.

Along with these concepts, we can add the following methods to help out as well

• A BeforeDraw() method where we can make the necessary preparations for the scene to draw
• A EndDraw() method where we can perform the necessary things to gracefully end drawing in our scene.

We'll also need a reference to our Game1 class so we can easily access things like the GraphicsDeviceManager. Lastly, each scene will need its own ContentManager instance to load and manage scene specific content.