1 - Visual Studio 2022 or Newer
Although it is possible to make games without Visual Studio or Rider, doing so requires advanced knowledge of MSBuild. We recommend downloading and installing Visual Studio Community which is free.
At a minimum you need to install .NET desktop development.
FlatRedBall projects are built with .NET 8 or newer. If you are using Visual Studio then you do not need to explicitly install .NET 8. If you are using a different IDE such as Visual Studio Code, then you need to install .NET SDK 8:
You must also install the .NET 6 SDK even if you have .NET 8 installed since the FlatRedBall Editor relies on this version for loading projects. This may change in a future version of FlatRedBall:
Newer Versions of Visual Studio (as of version 17.5.1) install .NET SDK 7.0 or newer which have a bug preventing projects from being loaded in the FlatRedBall Editor. Therefore, you need to manually install .NET 6 SDK.
3 - Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013
This dependency is required to build shader files. If you are certain that you will not be using any custom shaders or post processing, then you can skip this installation. However, we recommend installing this to avoid confusing errors if you do end up using any shaders.
Downloading FlatRedBall
The most common approach to making FlatRedBall games is to use the FlatRedBall Editor. The Editor can be downloaded from a pre-built .zip file, or it can be built from source. New users should download the pre-built .zip file.
Downloading and Running FlatRedBall
Download the latest zip file from .
Alternatively, the FlatRedBall Editor (no additional tools) prebuilt can be downloaded from Github. This is not recommended for new users, but experienced users can replace the FlatRedBall Glue folder with the contents from the built files:
(Optional) Unblock the ZIP file. This will prevent the windows protected your PC warning.
If you see the Windows protected your PC dialog, click More info -> Run Anyway
The FlatRedBall Editor should appear.
