Hello everyone;

I am running Linux Mint 17.3 and want to be able to start game programming with C#. I just want to work on 2D RPG right now but cannot figure out what to use. I have Visual Studio Code downloaded. Is there any RPG engine I should use? I want to be able to use my Linux laptop to do all the programming and don't want to go to my window laptop. Any suggestions? I have looked at UNITY but think that is too much right now. I did look at Monogame. Thank you for any suggestions and comments.

If sticking with C#, those two are your best bets AFAIK, on any platform.
In my opinion, Linux is the best environment you can be in for development. Trouble is when wanting to publish :D

But if you're just starting out, that shouldn't be a cencern at all. Focus on making games. Monogame is great.

Thank you I will look at Monogame.

I don't think they have a Unity version for Linux. I looked about a year ago and they didn't. You can build Unity programs in Windows for Linux, but I don't think there's an actual Unity version for Linux, unfortunately.

Monogame is pretty awesome. I learned game programming in XNA. It's easy enough anyone can begin with it, yet it's advanced enough that there is almost no advanced topic you can't do with it. It grows with you. It gave me the foundation to learn DX11 and then OpenGL.

The XNA 3 books were especially awesome. Although, you're going to have problems because MonoGame is like XNA 5.0 and there was an enormous change in the way graphics were handled between XNA 3 and 4. So, XNA 3 code will probably not work exactly as written in MonoGame. You can convert the code, but it would be a very difficult task for a beginner. I know I could because I've worked in all 3. But until you know what you're looking at it would be rough. But those XNA 3 books have a ton of game programming wisdom in them you may not be able to find anywhere else.

Check out RB Whitaker's stuff. He has some great MonoGame tutorials. He's been doing this since at least the XNA 3 days. I have some XNA stuff on my website although I've really been moving away from that over the past few years and focusing on OpenGL. Most of that has XNA 4.0 projects linked where you can see the entire source code. With MonoGame, you could maybe download the code and copy and paste it into a MonoGame project. There's likely few changes in the code itself. I actually converted two of the projects to MonoGame myself, the Matrices in Motion example and the Textured Grid example. Plus, the project files contain any art assets necessary.

I don't think they have a Unity version for Linux. I looked about a year ago and they didn't.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

I don't think they have a Unity version for Linux. I looked about a year ago and they didn't.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

Can confirm. I just downloaded the unofficial platform agnostic linux installer from here: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-on-linux-release-notes-and-known-issues.350256/

The latest release is from 2016.11.30, so quite recent.

It installed with no issues, and seems to run smoothly. I haven't put it under a lot of pressure yet, but it looks OK.

There are some rumors that it might emerge from beta around the release of Unity 5.7

Details:

I installed it on Manjaro Linux, 64 bit, using GNOME 3 desktop and adwaita GTK theme.

I ran these commands:

curl [link] > unity_installer.sh
chmod +x unity_installer.sh
sudo ./unity_installer.sh

That's it! The editor is compressed and appended to the end of the install script, so it is fairly large. ~2.2GB

Another option (actually what MonoGame uses under the hood) is OpenTK. It is basically a C# thin binding over standard open technologies such as OpenGL and OpenAL.

Unity (and the output binaries) only really work on a small number of specific Linux distros whereas OpenTK is supported by pretty much any platform that supports Mono.

I'd recommend going with MonoGame to start with, then possibly Unity unless you are more of a content person (you are good at making models, levels etc) than a programmer in which case I might recommend Unity instead.

I'd recommend using MonoGame over OpenTK as it makes it easier to get quick results while you also get better portability on non-computer platforms (phones, tablets, consoles etc).