Sorry that I missed your replies to this topic back in January. In case you are still around or anyone reading, I thought I would reply.

How did you initial trial of DotFuscator Professional Edition go?

About Controllers
I researched this since my game allows a Game Pad for use on PC. XNA and MonoGame only support XBOX compatible controllers. Supporting other input systems would require a lot of work outside of XNA/MonoGame.

You can use a 3rd party emulator like TocaEdit Xbox 360 Controller Emulator (http://www.x360ce.com/). This software will map a non-Xbox compatible controller to the Xbox control scheme and feed it to the game. There are downsides to this approach like having to place the emulator in the install directory. The good part about this approach is the emulator handles all the compatibility issues with most every controller ever made.

This is my opinion, but I would be wary of not supporting the keyboard and/or mouse on a PC game. Players will expect a PC game to not require a game pad if they do not want it to, and I imagine you may get a lot of negative reviews for not supporting.

Everyone: I mentioned I was in a online game-jam, and it was my first. I'd like outside opinions on this. My game, due to its nature, requires a game controller. Actually a Xbox compatible controller as is needed by MonoGame. Is this unreasonable to expect gamers to have a game controller? I've got advice to the contrary and maybe I was mistaken to expect that not every game can be controlled by keyboard/mouse in a PC game?

On a side note, does anyone have experience with older Usb joysticks in MonoGame or are we limited to x-input?

At any rate, after a few more posts, you'll be able to post your own links just fine. I think you only need the first "karma" bar before you can post links. (I have no control over when and how you can post links. It's a Wikidot thing.)

It's something I heard someone with absolutely no scruples talking about once in a previous workplace and would like to avoid. It is important for applications that are not games and contain propriety information even more so! It wasn't a concern when I was a .Net Web application developer as there were other ways things were secured, but I now consider having this knowledge part of my professional development.

Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but what is the concern with de-compiling someone else's work? Are you worried they would wholesale steal your game/idea or is it that they would have access to some of your methods/code? I guess having access to some of the code would allow them to review for vulnerabilities, but it is a video game so not too critical of a system.

I use click once as well with my XNA games to publish PC versions of my demo, but I haven't thought through what could be maliciously done with the provided published demos…

I also was intrigued when I saw that you had a competition going on through this site. I would not enter at this point, but I may enter an upcoming one. I'd rather compete or collaborate with others who are using the MonoGame framework or XNA and are programmers.

My game isn't 100% complete yet, but the competition is done. I am continuing to work on it. If your at all interested in taking a look, please visit my wordpress site: https://pandemicgame.wordpress.com/ to download an early version. Keep in mind I am aware my artistic skills are lacking and I am still developing my game dev skills though I am an experienced C# programmer.

I'm glad you brought it up!

Is that why you dropped into the chat room earlier? I saw that you had been in there, but I was AFK when you were around. Sorry about that.

I managed to obfuscate it afterwards using crypto obfuscator for .NET but this is a trial version. I found the .NET Reactor free version inadequate and a professional license is said to be expensive. Surely there is an open-source alternative or really inexpensive alternative. Could you write a tutorial on obfuscating MonoGame projects alongside deployment? I think other developers would find this invaluable and not everyone knows how easy it is to reverse engineer !

Thanks