Getting Involved

In order to contribute to the project you should learn and be familiar with how to use Git, how to create a fork of Cocos2D-Mono, and how to submit a Pull Request.

Branching

Cocos2D-Mono uses the following branches:

• master (or main in the other repositories) — release-only. Stable releases live here; it is never a target for feature work.
• dev — continued development, and the base for everything you write
• release/** — prepares and stabilizes a release before it merges to the default branch. That merge is then brought back into dev, so the two never drift apart
• feature/**, fix/**, update/**, docs/**, chore/** — the work itself

The rule that matters: branch from dev, and target your pull request at dev.

git checkout dev
git pull --ff-only
git checkout -b feature/my-change

Working from a fork? GitHub copies only the default branch unless you tell it otherwise, so your fork may not have a dev branch at all. Point a remote at this repository and branch from its dev instead:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/Cocos2D-Mono/<repository>.git
git fetch upstream dev
git checkout -b feature/my-change upstream/dev

This applies across every Cocos2D-Mono repository — the engine, docs, samples, project templates, and tests. Only release branches and release-coupled content go to the default branch.

Pull requests

Keep pull requests small and focused on a single topic; a large change split into a sequence of focused PRs lands faster and is easier to revert if something goes wrong. Where practical, keep mechanical changes (renames, file moves) in a separate PR from behavior changes, so reviewers can read each one for what it is.

After you submit a PR, your changes will be reviewed and provided with any constructive feedback to improve your submission. Once your changes are good for cocos2d-mono, your PR will be merged.

Where changes live

The project spans several repositories, and a change to one often has a counterpart in another:

Repository	Contents
cocos2d-mono	The engine, the Box2D port, and the test projects
Cocos2D-Mono.Docs	This documentation site
Cocos2D-Mono.Samples	Sample games and the tutorial sample projects
Cocos2D-Mono.ProjectTemplates	dotnet new templates and the Visual Studio extension
Cocos2D-Mono.Tests	A multi-platform showcase app built against the published packages

Notably, the tutorial pages on this site show code that readers copy into their own projects, and that code is kept verbatim in sync with the checkpoints in the samples repository. If you change one, change the other in the same round of work.

The engine repository's CONTRIBUTING.md carries the same conventions alongside the code, including the release flow.