Chapter 1. Introduction

Welcome to Stencyl — an exciting and fun game development tool used by many professional and amateur game developers around the world.

By the end of this book, we will know all the skills required to develop a product that exhibits all the features expected in a professionally-developed computer game.

However, before we start to create our game, we're going to learn about the Stencyl toolkit, install Stencyl, and test that everything is working as required, then experiment with some of the sample games that have been provided with the installation.

In this chapter we will learn the following:

• How Stencyl works

• How we'll learn to use Stencyl

• Why Stencyl is a great development tool

• Platforms that Stencyl runs on

• What makes Stencyl different

• Successful games created with Stencyl

• Using the free version of Stencyl

• Installing Stencyl and testing the setup