The editor supports multiple layers of tiles with various blending modes available. The Scene editor (shown above) enables you to paint scenes using tiles for a tileset, or to place your various actors within the world. The editor has several modes available across the top (Scene, Behaviors, Events, Physics, Atlases and Properties). Loading a Scene brings up the scene editor Created resources are available across all scenes. The game itself is broken up into Scenes and scenes are composed of Actors, Backgrounds, Fonts, Sounds and Tilesets. The Dashboard is the home page of your game.
Once you’ve actually created a project you’ve got even better integration with their online store ( misnomer, as everything currently is free ).
It comes with a sample game included and one nice feature of Stencyl is the ability to seamlessly download additional assets from their website including additional examples and editor extensions.
When you first launch Stencyl this is your initial view of the editor: Stencyl is a relatively self contained providing almost all of the tooling you need in a single editor. There is an HD video version of this guide available here. Amazingly enough, you may find you do not actually want to!
Stencyl provides a high level Lego block type programming experience but coders need not fear, you can drop into code easily if you want. Stencyl is free to use for the Flash target with additional platforms coming with a fee.
Stencyl is a cross platform 2D game engine with tools that run on Windows, Mac and Linux and capable of targeting all of those, plus Flash, Android and iOS.
The Closer Look At series is a cross between a preview, review and getting started guide and should help you determine if a game engine is right for you. Hence, if that sounds like what you would like to do, then this is definitely the way to go, especially if you have limited experience in the field.In this “A Closer Look at”, we will be taking an in-depth look at the Stencyl game engine. While it’s certainly not as powerful as Unity, Stencyl does have a unique purpose on the game editor market, mostly because it is aimed toward those who want to create casual games for the mobile market. Design the game you always wanted to play Hence, whether you are targeting iOS users and you want to see your game in the App Store, or you need to put the Android version on Google Play, everything is handled inside the editor and it only takes a couple of clicks. This makes use of blocks and you can actually position the statements by dragging them around with the mouse in order to obtain the desired sequence of commands and events.Īfter you are done tweaking your creation and you are confident that it can find a purpose on the market, the editor also allows you to easily publish it on a variety of online stores. Otherwise, you can use the handy drag-and-drop programming language integrated into the application. Publish your creation to a variety of platformsĪs previously mentioned, the code is virtually non-existent, unless you really want to deal with it. Naturally, if you choose to take a bit more control over the process, things can get a tad more complex as well. Drag-and-drop functionality has been integrated into everything and the keyboard barely enters the picture during the development phase. To start off with, everything has been automated and simplified, starting with the layout of the editor, all the way to the code itself, because you can avoid the sight of variables throughout the journey.
As such, whether you have never seen a line of code before, or you are just in too much of a rush and the final product doesn’t need to be that complex anyway, this may very well be the answer to your prayers. Stencyl is the type of application that seems to be powered by a sweatshop somewhere under the hood, because its purpose is to rapidly output simple video games on a variety of platforms, with minimum amount of work or knowledge required. Quickly design, program, and publish your game Hence, there’s always room for one more game creator, especially in the mobile gaming division. With all the tools that are available nowadays to eager developers, it’s no wonder that the indie market is booming, while some triple-A titles from respectable studios struggle to get a return on the overall investment. Making video games is far easier now than it was a few years ago, but it’s still not as simple as baking muffins, or chasing snails uphill, which appears to be the goal.