Welcome to this new version of the Voxel Guides. This time, we will let go Unity and use MonoGame instead. This guide will be quick, we will install MG and Visual Studio.
Years ago, Microsoft gave us an engine called XNA. It was mainly used to develop Xbox games with all the basic 2D and 3D features. XNA Became MonoGame, which is now a free cross-platform engine and can be used for PC and Mobile.
For two reasons. First, the engine is cross-platform. It is easy to understand. And it will teach you how to make a game from scratch, without a ready-to-use engine like Unity. Here you will make your own engine.
- So... How do i use MonoGame?
- First you will need Visual Studio. There is a free version that you can use, called "Visual Studio Community" (Or "Express"). You can get it here. It won't limit you in time. Start the installer you just downloaded. It will look for files you may already have and download what you need. (Visual Studio is a powerful IDE by Microsoft. Is has everything you need to develop games and applications).
- Then you will have a window with the modules you can install for VS. You can install the Unity module to link it to Unity (Just make sure to uncheck "Unity 64-bit Editor" to avoid downloading Unity again). But here we only need ".NET desktop development". It will give everything we need to develop applications in C#. Then click "Install". (You can also install language packs and more components in your modules).
- Wait until the installation finishes but we will need to install MonoGame before starting VS. You can get it here. Select the version you want to install and then "MonoGame for Visual Studio".
- Now you can install MonoGame and it will be added to Visual Studio.
- Finally, when you start Visual Studio, go to File > New > Project and select "MonoGame Windows Project". Give it a name and a location before creating it. I will start with a 2D voxel terrain, so i will call it "VoxelEngine_2D".
Now, you have installed MonoGame and Visual Studio. You can look at the documentation on the website and play with them to know how they work. But i will explain everything in the next guides.