A collection of project templates to quickly start making games using XNA and Visual Studio.

To use a template first figure out which project type you wish to deploy then:

1. Navigate to a directory, e.g. "Portable Game"
2. Select the directory's contents
3. Right click and select "Send to Compressed Folder"
4. Give the compressed folder an appropriate name, e.g. "Portable Game"
5. Copy the compressed folder to C:\Path\To\VisualStudio\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#
6. Start Visual Studio and select File > New Project
7. Find the new template in the list and continue as normal

A good place to start is the Portable Game project. This will project will create a:

1. Portable Class Library for common code. (Make sure to install the Portable Class Library extension.)
2. Content project to organize your game's assets.
3. Windows 7 Desktop XNA project for your actual game.
4. Test project to unit test classes defined in the common library.

Once you've created a Portable Game you may wish to add a Windows 8 project to support the new app store. Using MonoGame it's possible to target Windows 8 using most of the code written for Windows 7. To do so you must have Visual Studio 2012 installed. This project will create a:

1. Windows 8 project
2. App.xaml and MainPage.xaml ready to contain your game

Please note, after creating the project you will still need to add references to MonoGame yourself.