Using Godot with C# in 2024

About a year and a half ago, starting a project with Godot and C# was a brave choice. There's always been a C# channel in the main Godot Discord server, but information and tutorials (let alone demos) were all but non-existent.

Now that it's 2024, let's take a look and see how far we've come.

Throughout 2023, a lot of things happened in the game development world. Some of these changes were big news for game developers using C#, too:

• Godot 4 was released!
• Unity did things that game developers didn't like.
• Godot's C# integration was completely overhauled and ported over from Mono to the .NET SDK.
• Experimental iOS and Android mobile platform support for C# Godot games shipped in Godot 4.2.
• The Godot Forums came back in style.
• The Godot Fund is now bringing in over $40,000/month!

Besides Godot's increased financial support and broader endorsements from established organizations, the Godot C# community itself continues to thrive. We've even observed a new baseline level of user activity on the Chickensoft website, beginning right about the time that Unity was introducing an installation fee.

Late in 2023, we released an open source, fully-tested 3D platformer game demo built with Godot and C# using the awesome GDQuest assets. We'll be maintaining the demo over the next year, too, keeping it up-to-date and cleaning it up as we learn new things.

chickensoft-games/GameDemo

Gamefromscratch covered our game demo, too — check it out below!

If you want to know more about it, feel free to read our recent treatise on game architecture — it breaks the demo down and goes into painstaking detail about the technical decisions that went into it. But, bring your reading glasses — it's a long read.

Speaking of Godot game architecture with C#, there's now also the Godot Architecture Organization Advice repository — go check it out and give it a star, too!

Chickensoft is now home to 14 open source packages designed to solve common problems you might run into if you're using Godot with C#:

• GodotEnv: Automate and standardize Godot installation, version switching, and addon management on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
• GoDotTest: Run and debug automated tests locally or from the command-line for CI/CD purposes.
• setup-godot: Install and run Godot on macOS, Linux, and Windows GitHub runners with support for Godot export templates.
• LogicBlocks: Easy-to-use, hierarchical state machines for games. It even generate state diagrams of your code for you, too.
• AutoInject: Tree-based dependency injection that lets you easily scope dependencies to specific Godot scene subtrees.
• GodotGame: Template for quickly spinning up a C# game with the Chickensoft best practices already applied.
• ...and more, all easily reachable from our homepage.

🎨 TerraBrush

TerraBrush is a Godot map editor addon written in C# by spimort, and it features a number of incredible map-editing capabilities. Be sure to give it a star and try it out in your next 3D project!

🍰 Layer Generator

Anton released GodotLayersSourceGenerator, a generator that will produce mappings of your collision layer names. He also updated BinaryBundle, a C# serialization generator for use with netcode.

📺 Arbitrary Color Reduction and Palette Ordered Dithering

If you're looking to make your game a little more retro, check out Mark's Arbitrary Color Reduction and Palette Ordered Dithering shader that was released recently. Here's a video of it applied to a pseudo-isometric 3D scene:

🌉 Unidot Importer

Looking to bring assets over from Unity? You can now do that easily with the Unidot Importer — it will automatically convert your .unitypackage assets into Godot .tscn scene files!

If you're using Godot with C#, or interested in doing so, you are no longer alone! Many of us are actively working on creating a better game development future with Godot and C# by sharing tools, documentation, and games we create. We'd love to see you, too!