Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide: You don't need to know anything about game development or computer programming when you use the Stencyl toolkit. This book guides you through the whole process of creating a game, publishing and profiting from it.

INNES BORKWOOD

$48.99

4.5 (19 Ratings)

Paperback May 2013 336 pages 1st Edition

INNES BORKWOOD

$48.99

4.5 (19 Ratings)

Paperback May 2013 336 pages 1st Edition

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Key benefits

Learn important skills that will enable you to quickly create exciting video games, without the complexity of traditional programming languages
Find out how to maximize potential profits through licencing, paid-sponsorship and in-game advertising
Explore numerous step-by-step tutorials that will guide you through the essential features of Stencyl's powerful game-development toolkit

Description

Creating video games has traditionally been a long and complicated process, requiring years of experience and a vast array of skills. However, with the introduction of comprehensive game-development toolkits such as Stencyl, the fun has returned to the art of game-creation ‚Äì anyone who has the desire to create their own video game can now do so with almost any desktop computer and a free software download from the Internet!Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide will put you on the fast-track to learning the essentials of the powerful Stencyl game-development toolkit. You will develop a complete, ready-to-publish video game including in-game advertising, by following the clear, step-by-step tutorials, supported by numerous screenshots and practical examples.This book will guide you through all the important steps required to develop and publish your video game. Starting with the installation and testing of the Stencyl toolkit, you will very quickly advance to the fun and exciting process of creating a playable game. The step-by-step tutorials will guide you from a blank screen, right through to giving your game that final polish and sharing it with the rest of the world. Whilst developing your feature-complete video game, you will learn how to easily detect collisions in your game using Stencyl's built-in physics engine. You'll discover how to use the powerful animation tools included in Stencyl's toolkit, and you'll find out how to make your game shine with sounds and visual special effects. You will also discover how Stencyl makes it easy to utilize the touch-screen and accelerometer features of smartphones and tablet computers. You will learn all the essential skills required to develop a video game from scratch ‚Äì right through to publishing a game on the Internet and testing games on the most popular mobile devices.

Who is this book for?

This book is perfect for beginning game-developers, who have no prior knowledge of creating games or computer programming. It's also an ideal resource for experienced game-developers and designers who need to create rapid prototypes, or who want to speed up the game-development process. Teachers and students who think learning should be fun will also benefit from this book! No prior knowledge of game-development or computer programming is required.

What you will learn

Installing and testing the Stencyl game development toolkit.
Rapidly creating your video game using Stencyl s drag and drop gameplay designer.
Detecting and responding to collisions using Stencyl s built-in physics engine.
Creating customized game-play using Stencyl s intuitive instruction-block system.
Animating objects in your game and modifying them with Stencyl s built-in image editor.
Fine-tuning your game and turning it into a professional product.
Adding sound-effects and a soundtrack to your game.
Implementing some of the special features of smartphones and tablets.

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Rachel Z Aug 14, 2013

This book is a comprehensive intro to Stencyl - a game design platform I use to introduce creative teens to computer science. I found it to be paced well and highly accessible. I was delighted to see the tutorials follow the same methodology I use when running workshops - solve a problem and introduce a new problem, solve that problem, introduce a new problem, etc.The book guides you from creating your first game to publishing it and - hopefully - making money. And it includes legal, licensing, and project management tips to boot. All in all, this is a solid book that I'd recommend - without reservations - to someone just starting out in the wild world of game design - and I don't say that about many books.

Amazon Verified review

Michael A. Petty Jan 31, 2014

I was given a review copy of Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner’s Guide. Before jumping into the details of my review, I’ll say I found the book to be an enjoyable read. I learned a lot and I can safely say this will be my go-to resource for my students when they are learning to make games with Stencyl.Right away I was glad to see Joe Dolivo’s name in the list of reviewers for the book’s content. When I started programming with Stencyl almost two years ago, I contacted the Stencyl team to ask about classroom resources. I liked the promise of Stencyl, but I was having difficulty learning to create some simple classroom games. They directed me to Joe as someone who knows the program and knows education. He pointed out a few online resources and also told me this book was in the works. With Jonathan Chung, Stencyl’s creator, writing the forward and Joe Dolivo as part of the writing process, I knew the book’s author was writing with authority.The book provides a great overview of Stencyl, leaving the reader with an excellent idea of what to expect from this game creation tool. Beyond that, most of the ten chapters are a step by step walk-through of creating a platform game called Monkey Run. Instead of progressing through the menus, tools or other features, it takes us through the stages of game development. Anyone who works through those chapters will have created a playable computer game. What more could a beginning game designer ask for?Now, as I mentioned above, I had trouble getting started with Stencyl and I didn’t have much luck with the online tutorials. I can say without question Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development is a vast improvement over those resources. The writing is very clear. I really like how each stage starts with a brief overview of what we’ll accomplish with the game, then it goes right into a step by step explanation of how to actually make it happen using Stencyl’s tools such as actors, behaviors and blocks.I was very pleased with these explanations, but I think the best sections are the “What just happened?” segments that follow them. As an educator, I know students want to jump right into the doing. They’re not big on reading paragraph after paragraph of the overall concept and plan.So instead of trying to explain the why and all the terms upfront, the book elaborates on what we did and why after we’ve gone through the steps. It’s a great way to teach. By the time the learner gets to these sections, he or she has become somewhat familiar with the tools and probably already has some questions that the sections will address.One last positive I’ll mention is I appreciated the care taken to credit the creators of the graphics and audio used in the game. The attention given to copyright and creative commons licenses, both explicitly in the appendix and by example throughout the chapters, will be very helpful as I teach these practices to students.With all the praise I have offered, I do have to add I haven’t yet worked through any of the actual programming. I read over the first half of the book carefully and skimmed through the later chapters. I hope to return to it, preferably with students, actually going through all the programming in Stencyl as I do. At this time I can only say it all makes sense with the things I have created on my own previously.I did download the sample code that came with the book and I tried out one of the advanced sections. (The sample code can be downloaded from the publisher's site. It is provided in sections that match each step of the book. This is a nice touch because learners can jump in at any point of the book or development process they need and have just enough of the code prepared for them in advance.)And definitely worth mentioning, the book refers to Stencyl 3.x, but that hasn’t been released yet. The Stencyl site does say 3.0 is available through a closed beta program to paying customers. I can only assume the authors expected that version to come out the same time the book did, but for whatever reason it hasn’t. As I mentioned, I didn’t notice anything in the steps that looked different than my initial experience with Stencyl. Also, the code section I tested out in my current version of Stencyl seemed to work fine. If there are features of 3.0 that would be significantly different, they aren’t immediately apparent.All things considered, I am very happy to have this book for myself and my students. It has answered some questions I had about this very promising game design tool and I think it can help many more young learners to find success in game creation. I’m not currently teaching a game design or programming class, but the next time I have the opportunity, I will use Stencyl and I will provide this book to the students.

Kyle Willey Aug 06, 2013

I was contacted to review this because of my work on Stencyl projects in the past, and I have to say that it's exactly the sort of thing I wish I had when I had picked up the tool. While it's possible to find a lot of tutorials on building your first game in Stencyl, I feel that this really goes above and beyond, and it's even helped me not only find code-blocks that I could have been using to great effect all along, but also understand some of the fundamentals in ways that I hadn't, even though I'd completed all the examples and already moved on to more advanced design. I'm a future educator, and I'm hoping to have a couple copies of this on a shelf in my classroom to show my students, because it makes the already wonderful Stencyl even less intimidating to jump into.EDIT: One thing to note is that this *is* a beginner's guide, so if you're already familiar with Stencyl it may give some new insights, particularly since it's written with the assistance of Stencyl's creator and some notable users, but it doesn't cover some of the more obscure and interesting features of Stencyl that are less common but may be useful in some cases, like fetching files through HTTP, but it provides a solid core from which to work.

Jack Sullivan Aug 12, 2013

Making games is fun. Once, my brother and I designed a live-action game where we would jump down a flight of stairs head-first to see who could target the pile of dirty clothes our mom was going to wash that day. The loser would usually crack his head open on the wall, missing the pile entirely and bleeding all over everything. Mom would scream in panic and rush us to the emergency room for stitches. Dad's work clothes would have blood stains all over them. That would make him mad.Anyway, this is far a far less violent method of game design and gets my highest recommendation. It's laid out in easy-to-follow instructions. You should probably have a computer to work on before buying this book.

Nelson Santos Nov 05, 2013

I am an experienced professional programmer with some background knowledge in game development but I have never used a game creation tool before and wasn't sure what to expect from Stencyl. All I knew was that it looked easy to use and was a quick way of getting a game idea up and running. I was eager to get started and I wanted to minimize the amount of time it took to learn the tool itself. Then I found this book. I purchased the cost effective eBook and read it cover to cover in 3 to 4 days. After that time I can say that I was almost completely comfortable using the Stencyl IDE and I learned the rest through use.I recommend this book for teaching the core concepts involved in using the Stencyl tool. As an experienced programmer, I grasped the concepts introduced in the book easily and was glad I made the purchase. I blazed through learning the tool and am now in the middle of a production.Thanks to the author for this book.

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide: You don't need to know anything about game development or computer programming when you use the Stencyl toolkit. This book guides you through the whole process of creating a game, publishing and profiting from it.

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