Getting Started with Godot, C# and Rider
Skip to the video at the end if all you want to do is setup these tools
As I mentioned on my previous post, I will be using Godot for learning game development. Although I’ve played with Godot a bit before, and I found it very pleasant to work with, for some reason it didn’t stick. I’m not entirely sure why, but one of my hypothesis is that my personal preference for a development environment is different than the default one provided by Godot. The environment is actually quite powerful and very easy to get started with. But I constantly struggle with the editor and GDScript. I find my muscle memory going to “IntelliJ muscle memory go!… wait no Emacs go!… wait no VSCode go!…. wait no Godot Editor go!”. As for GDScript although it has thankfully added optional type labels, I still struggle to maintain the code I write on it easily readable.
Make no mistake, neither of these are issues with the tools or the language, these problems are my own. The same way many have written amazing programs, tools and systems in Python, any Python script I write that is larger than 50 lines ends up being a mess. I don’t doubt that given enough time I could adjust to GDScript, the editor, or configure VSCode to work GDScript exactly the way I want it. But I’m setting out to make a game with the least friction possible. So I opted for using tools more familiar than the default tools, since they are so available. So I will be (trying) to write my Godot game with C# the language, and the IDE Rider.
Setting this up
So funny thing happened while I was writing this blog post. My previous blog post started with the explicit intent of it being a tutorial about the initial setup, and turned into “This is all the ways I have failed to make games, lulz.” So I embraced that, and kept writing that post around that topic. While I was finishing up my post, an awesome YouTuber I watch (Gamesfromscratch) created a video on that exact same topic. At first I told myself “Hah! What are the chances! No matter I’ll go deep into the details and leave not stone unturned.”
I kept taking so many snapshots of so many steps. Then I realized I needed to also add annotations to all the images and write all the steps to follow. So I set off on that, spent some hours on it, found some tools to make the process better, and then I remembered my previous blog post. “I’m setting out to make a game, not to….”. And the past 2-3 days I have worked on learning to make games less than before, because I’ve been working on this infinitely detailed tutorial… when a perfectly good video has been done by a YouTuber I enjoy.
Anyways, maybe some day I’ll finish that blog post. (I’ve “tagged it” as ‘ABANDONNED’, typo and everything). Realistically, you should just see this video, and follow the steps mentioned in it. See you later space cowboy.