Why Stencyl is a great development tool

Stencyl is a ready-to-use, complete, game development studio that can be used by anyone from beginners to game development experts to create professional-quality games; there is no requirement to purchase or install additional software. The Stencyl game development process avoids the repetitive, complicated requirements of writing hundreds of lines of computer code, and gets you started with the creation of your games without being distracted by the intricate details that traditional computer programming languages require.

Rapid prototyping and development

If you have an idea for a game, Stencyl will enable you to rapidly create a working prototype, so that you can quickly progress to creating a completed game using the great features that come built into the Stencyl toolkit, including:

• Scene Designer

• Drag-and-drop Gameplay Designer

• Resource management (sounds and graphics)

• Animation editor

• Graphics editor

• Online resource sharing

We'll be learning how to use all these features to enable us to quickly build our video game.

No code development

Games can be created without writing a single line of computer code, by using Stencyl's drag-and-drop Gameplay Designer. Its clever system of building sequences of commands using specially designed instruction blocks means that we can only create instructions that make sense to the computer.

If you have ever tried writing computer games using a language such as Apple's Objective-C or Adobe's ActionScript, you probably know how frustrating it can be to ensure that every bracket, period, and special symbol appears in exactly the right place. That's a problem of the past with Stencyl!

Sharing resources with other Stencyl developers

One of the many great features of Stencyl is StencylForge — a ready-built repository of game resources that can be used for downloading graphics, audio, gameplay rules (known as Behaviors in Stencyl), and utilities. You can also upload your own resources to share with others.

StencylForge is a remarkable asset to the Stencyl community, and it's one of the exciting features of Stencyl that we'll be learning to use while we develop our game.

In addition to being able to share resources using StencylForge, there is a great community of helpful Stencyl users for both beginner and experienced users at community.stencyl.com.