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🏁 Getting Started

Ready to make games with Godot and C#? Let's start by making sure your development environment is ready to go!

📦 Installing the .NET SDK​

To use C# with Godot, you'll need .NET 6. The .NET 6 SDK works great for both Godot 3 and Godot 4.

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We often write file paths like ~/folder. The ~ is a shortcut for your home folder. On Windows, ~ expands to something like C:\Users\you. On macOS, ~ expands to /Users/you. On Linux, ~ expands to /home/you. For example, ~/Documents expands to C:\Users\you\Documents on Windows, /Users/you/Documents on macOS, and /home/you/Documents on Linux.

Use the Microsoft provided installer to install .NET 6 on macOS. For more information about installing the .NET 6 SDK on Mac, see Microsoft's article for Mac.

If you want to install the .NET 6 SDK manually, you can find all available downloads here.

Make sure you keep track of where the .NET 6 SDK was installed. We'll need that path later.

🚉 Installing Mono​

For Godot 3, you need to install Mono. Instructions and installers are available for each platform on the Mono website.

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You can skip this step if you're only using Godot 4. Godot 4 integrates directly with .NET 6 instead of Mono.

🤖 Installing Godot​

You'll need to download Godot, if you haven't already.

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Godot currently comes in 2 flavors: regular, and mono. For C# development, you must get the mono version!

Godot 4 eventually intends to combine both versions into one, but that hasn't happened just yet.

❓ Where to Put Godot​

Since Godot doesn't have an installer, you get to decide where to put it on your computer. Here's some recommendations for where to install it on each platform.

Move Godot to /Applications/Godot_mono.app. This is where all your other Mac apps are, anyways!

🖥 Shell Environment​

Let's modify the shell environment to contain environment variables that point to Godot and the .NET SDK.

Once we do this, we'll be able to run Godot from a terminal and create the proper launch configurations for Visual Studio Code.

If ~/.zshrc doesn't exist, you'll need to create it.

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To toggle visibility of hidden files in the macOS Finder, press Cmd + Shift + . — it also works in file dialogs!

Add the following to your ~/.zshrc file:

# .NET SDK Configuration
export DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 # Disable analytics
export DOTNET_ROOT="/usr/local/share/dotnet/dotnet"

# Add the .NET SDK to the system paths so we can use the `dotnet` tool.
export PATH="/usr/local/share/dotnet:$PATH"
export PATH="/usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$PATH"

# Run this if you ever run into errors while doing a `dotnet restore`
alias nugetclean="dotnet nuget locals --clear all"

# For Godot 3, add mono to the path.
export PATH="/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/Commands/mono:$PATH"

# Environment variables for Godot
export GODOT="/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot"
export GODOT4="/Applications/Godot4.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot"

# Add Godot to the system paths (so that you can execute it from anywhere)
export PATH="/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS:$PATH"
export PATH="/Applications/Godot4.app/Contents/MacOS:$PATH"

# Prevents the occasional "can't create res://.mono" error
# Issue: https://godotengine.org/qa/21875/cant-generate-mono-glue-on-osx
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/6.12.0/lib/pkgconfig"
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Depending on how you install the .NET SDK and Mono, you may or may not need to add them to your path in ~/.bashrc. You can run which dotnet and which mono in a bash shell to see if they're already in your path. If they are, remove the export PATH lines for them.

Make sure the paths to the .NET 6 SDK, Mono, and Godot match where those tools were installed on your particular system, as it can vary depending on how they were installed.

If you're not installing both Godot 3 and 4, remove the lines you don't need.

⌨️ Visual Studio Code​

All of Chickensoft's packages and templates are designed to work well with Visual Studio Code (VSCode).

You can download Visual Studio Code here.

✨ Your First Project​

You can use Chicken to create a new project. Chicken is a command-line tool that helps you create and manage Godot projects.

If all your paths are setup correctly, you can open a bash shell to install it.

dotnet tool install --global Chickensoft.Chicken
# or to update to the latest version
dotnet tool update --global Chickensoft.Chicken

Using the Godot 3 game template, generate a new project:

chicken egg crack ./my_godot_3_game \
  --egg "git@github.com:chickensoft-games/godot_3_game.git" \
  -- --title "MyGodot3Game"

This will clone the egg (template) from GitHub to the subfolder my_godot_3_game and then perform the edit actions described in the template to customize it for your project.

The -- is required to separate the arguments to Chicken from the arguments to the egg. The egg requires one argument, --title, which is the name of your new project.

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Already have your own way of making new Godot C# projects? Learn how to make your own eggs for Chicken!

In the project folder, you can run the following to make Godot generate the C# glue for your project so that you can run it from VSCode:

godot --build-solutions

Open the new project in VSCode and use the provided launch configurations to debug your application. Make sure Godot is open, or nothing will happen!