In January of 2013 I had seen articles saying that Microsoft was officially stopping development to update it's XNA Framework. When I heard this I was struck with sadness and memories knowing that without XNA I never would have become a Game Developer, and maybe not even a programmer.
A year or so before XNA was deprecated I grew to a point where I felt I needed to strive to program in something more challenging than XNA, something that would give me more control. I had always been told that C++ was a great language, and that it was "The Industry Standard." On a whim I decided I would try to learn C++. As you might imagine this didn't turn out as well as I would have hoped, I spent about a week frustrating myself over tutorials on how to use SDL 1.2, yet I had never taken the time to understand what was going on in C++. It took less than a month of frustration before I decided that without proper knowledge C++ and SDL would be too annoying/difficult to use.
Last year after I was accepted into RIT's Game Design and Development program I decided that I wanted to come into the major making an impression that would last a lifetime. I talked to my friend Ben (https://github.com/bypylko) and asked if he would be interested in creating a clone of XNA in C++. We talked back and forth about licensing issues that would arise from doing this and concluded on something along the lines of "If MonoGame is getting away with it why can't we?" Because of our love/hate relationship with recursive acronyms we decided to name our (at the time) library, MINX. Meaning, MINX IS Not XNA.
Here are links to the MINX GitHub and Development Blog
To be continued. . .