Paper3D

An experimental project design to emulate the graphical style of the classic Paper Mario games.

Goals

The goals of this project are as follows:

Have a re-usable codebase that can be dropped into any MonoGame project for rendering
Understand the 3D rendering process in MonoGame
Enable Spritesheet animations with the target plane
Have this all ready before August 9, 2025 (the start date of Magical Girl Game Jam 12)

While it'll be nice to be a drag-and-drop solution, some setup will be required by the project. Furthermore, understanding the content here will be crucial.

And while I'm at it, I might learn Gum, too. That's a UI library for MonoGame.

Notes

DAE files need the FBX importer, not the Open Asset Importer in the Content Builder.

Requirements

Good performance is a must. Many of the games I'll release using this rendering engine will be published on web, which is slower than native apps.
MUST Render to a render target. This will make resizing the viewport easier in the long run.
MAY support custom 3D models.
MAY support 3D animation, but that's left as an exercise to the reader. I'm not doing that.
MUST use an index buffer for its built-in objects/rendering. This is for performance's sake.

Supporting Libaries

Okay, it won't be completely drag-and-drop. We're going to rely on MonoGame.Extended's ECS for rendering 3D objects.

Resources