bdashdash (u/bdashdash)

anonymous908213 · 9 days ago

There isn't really a comparison to be made between MonoGame and Godot. MonoGame is for programmers. Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development. Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.

I think the greatest flaw in MonoGame, however, is that their cross-platform abstraction notably excludes web. Given how relatively thin MonoGame is, I think you're better off building your own framework that supports compiling to WASM as well, if you have any experience as a developer already. It is what I did and took some effort but was pretty well doable and didn't take all that long, and the payoff of being able to share your games instantly in the browser for anyone to play with just a click of a link is so worth it.

The other notable flaw in MonoGame is that the content pipeline thing it has is horrendous. When I tried it, I ended up simply bypassing using that pipeline at all. They are currently in the process of reworking it completely, I believe, but I'm not sure when that's supposed to release.

Maybe the value in MonoGame is that it does support consoles, though; I have no idea what developing for console is like, and only target web/computer/phone OS platforms myself.

bdashdash · 9 days ago

Could you elaborate in how you've built your own framework for making your monogame project available in web?

I've been using KNI but it's been a real headache getting my game to run on itch.io.

cyber_kinetist · 20 days ago

I think this was the most important insight in the article:

> I experimented with Rust/Bevy and Unity before settling on Godot. Bevy’s animations and visuals weren’t as crisp, and Claude struggled with its coordinate conventions - likely a combination of less training data and Bevy leaving many core features, like physics, to the community. Unity was a constant struggle to keep the MCP bridge between Claude and the editor healthy. It frequently hung, and I never figured out how to get Claude Code to read the scene hierarchy from the editor. Godot’s text-based scene format turned out to be a huge advantage - Claude can read and edit .tscn files directly.

Didn't expect Godot to be the most friendly game engine for LLM usage! I think it's because of various factors - Godot has been used quite a lot in recent years so there are various code examples on the Internet, and its scene file format (.tscn) is very concise enough for LLMs to write and edit directly (Unity has its own YAML-based format but it's very unfriendly for human consumption, and Unreal stores its core assets in binary files)

bdashdash · 20 days ago

I also want to throw MonoGame into the mix here. Since its purely C#, Claude Code works great for it. It does mean you dont have the visual engine tools you get with Godot, but you could even get Claude to build these for your game.

Im personally finding it a lot of fun to work this way.