Hah I just recently was doing some soul searching for a game dev environment to get started with. I did a wee bit of 2D game dev in college 15 years ago, and wanted to scratch the same itch.
At this point, I demand a good IDE experience: as much intellisense as possible, great debugger, hot reloading.
Anyway, C# and MonoGame was what won at the end of the day, at least to just get the ball rolling. Rider is a great IDE, and MonoGame… at least has great getting started documentation to get me going again. Once I knock out a few cutesy games I’ll probably go build my own thing on top of SDL3, so that I’m not held back by MonoGame. Also the MonoGame content builder is just completely broken on Mac, so on the side I am building my own Rider plugin to bring actually good intellisense to the mgcb file, so that I don’t need the broken editor gui (all it does is manage the mgcb file anyway, arguably should have just been an IDE plugin the whole time)
I tried Dragonruby, really wanted to like it, but the development experience is just… not there. It live reloads, but seems to offer no IDE tooling whatsoever. They talk a lot about emacs, maybe you’re supposed to use it with emacs, which I just have zero interest in doing. You’re also not using MRI, or the full Ruby language, so a lot of tooling for “normal Ruby” may not work. C# is just C# with MonoGame, I can use all the tools, import all the nuget packages (if you really want to), etc.
I felt like going with a C based project would lock me out of having hot reloading, but that might not be true, please let me know if I am wrong!. I know of a C++ hot reloading thing specifically made for game dev, it’s in my notes somewhere, just not sure if it’s suitable for use (you sure do have to sift through lots of abandoned experimental stuff in this world)
Ah yeah Í keep seeing it come up, I will take a look! This weekend was gonna toy with C++ to rebuild what I got done with MonoGame, but a next mini experiment can perhaps be Odin!
At this point, I demand a good IDE experience: as much intellisense as possible, great debugger, hot reloading.
Anyway, C# and MonoGame was what won at the end of the day, at least to just get the ball rolling. Rider is a great IDE, and MonoGame… at least has great getting started documentation to get me going again. Once I knock out a few cutesy games I’ll probably go build my own thing on top of SDL3, so that I’m not held back by MonoGame. Also the MonoGame content builder is just completely broken on Mac, so on the side I am building my own Rider plugin to bring actually good intellisense to the mgcb file, so that I don’t need the broken editor gui (all it does is manage the mgcb file anyway, arguably should have just been an IDE plugin the whole time)
I tried Dragonruby, really wanted to like it, but the development experience is just… not there. It live reloads, but seems to offer no IDE tooling whatsoever. They talk a lot about emacs, maybe you’re supposed to use it with emacs, which I just have zero interest in doing. You’re also not using MRI, or the full Ruby language, so a lot of tooling for “normal Ruby” may not work. C# is just C# with MonoGame, I can use all the tools, import all the nuget packages (if you really want to), etc.
I felt like going with a C based project would lock me out of having hot reloading, but that might not be true, please let me know if I am wrong!. I know of a C++ hot reloading thing specifically made for game dev, it’s in my notes somewhere, just not sure if it’s suitable for use (you sure do have to sift through lots of abandoned experimental stuff in this world)