New to Monogame - should I jump immediately into Nez or Extended?

Hello,

After messing around with some engines (did some very basic stuff in Unreal, Unity, Godot) I found myself mostly fighting with their UIs and feeling confused by some of their suggested workflows. I have a programming background (not C# though), so Monogame seemed like a logical option to turn to.

So I just started learning MG and I’m quite happy. I have all the basics set up and I like how everything seems logical and clean. There’s obviously a learning curve, but writing code is ultimately much more comfortable than navigating through endless menus in full-blown engines.

I’m mostly interested in purely 2D games and my main concern right now is should I jump immediately to stuff like Nez or Monogame.Extended? I like all the extras they offer (colliders, ECS, tilemap importers) but I’m afraid that using them immediately as a novice might prevent me from learning some MG basics which might be a problem in the future.
Any opinions on that?

Thanks

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Hi and welcome on board :slight_smile:

I’d say it depends what you want to achieve. Do you have a game-concept that you want to bring to life quickly? Or do you want to experiment, fiddle around and learn something?

Imho it’s always better to try your best to implement some systems yourself (like Collision, Particles, tilemaps, ECS, etc). It may not be the most efficient solution, but you’ll learn a lot on the way. After that you can always switch to an existing solution like Nez or Monogame.Extended and even feel more confident in using them because you know the basics of how they work.

But if you wanna go for a game right away, don’t re-invent the wheel and go for an existing solution.

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Hey, thanks for the reply!
Yeah I’ll probably fiddle around a bit first, do a very simple platformer prototype with the basics and work from there.
It’s nice to see that this community is active, cheers

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