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.

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:

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

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!

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.

When we talk about target platforms, we mean the devices that our game can run on.

Games created with Stencyl can be played on most common platforms including web browsers, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and iOS devices (for example, iPhone and iPad), Android, and Linux. The main issues that we need to think about, when it comes to the target platform, are the screen size of the game and how our game will be controlled (that is, keyboard, mouse, or touch). Stencyl does all the hard work for you!

Currently, at the time of publication, Stencyl can target the following platforms:

Stencyl can be installed on nearly all popular desktop computers, and Stencyl files can be freely exported and imported between the different desktop platforms, which is very useful when working with friends or colleagues who use different platforms for game development.

Whichever platform we want to publish our game onto, Stencyl does all the hard work for us! It creates the game code specifically for that device, and it will not have to run the game in a wrapper that can slow our games down.

Although that might sound fairly technical, it just means that our games will run at the fastest possible speeds without us having to learn a new programming language for each target platform. Stencyl takes care of all the hard work when it comes to publishing to different target devices; we can just concentrate on creating our games!

Probably the greatest differentiator between Stencyl and other game development tools is the way in which the gameplay instructions are built. With many game development tools, you must hand-code the instructions in a specific programming language, which can be very tedious and time-consuming. Or, with some other development tools, you are required to point and click on the instructions that you want to select in order to build rules that the objects in your game will follow, which can be very restricting when it comes to complex gameplay.

The developers of Stencyl have created a system that offers an impressive set of options when compared to other currently available game development methods. There are four different options available to game developers when using Stencyl, so we can do the following:

The magic of Stencyl is that we can mix and match any combination of the above development methods!

For example, if we want to create a basic game with common gameplay features, it's very easy to use Stencyl's built-in behaviors, and it's quite possible to develop a complete game in this manner.

At the time of publication, there were more than fifty built-in behaviors, a small sample of which is shown in the following screenshot:

Once we understand how the prebuilt behaviors work, we can either customize existing ones or we can create our own from scratch using the drag-and-drop behavior editor.

The following screenshot shows an example of a custom-built behavior, and even if you have never seen Stencyl before, you might be able to understand some of the instructions.

Finally, more advanced developers may choose to hand-code their own special game routines using the Haxe programming language (pronounced Hex, according to the main developer). This is certainly not a requirement for creating games, and many Stencyl users have never even tried this kind of development! Most Stencyl developers use a combination of prebuilt behaviors, customized behaviors, and also behaviors that they have created themselves, and these are the methods that we are going to be using throughout this book.

When our game is finished, we just need to decide which platforms we want to target, and Stencyl will do the rest with a few clicks of the mouse!

The free version of Stencyl has very few limitations compared to the subscription versions and in practice, you can use all the important game development features and make any kind of game with the free version that you can make with the subscription versions.

The main limitations of the free version of Stencyl are:

The great thing about the free version of Stencyl is that we can develop our games to completion, publish them for Flash or HTML5, and even sell them if we wish.

If, after publishing for Flash or HTML5, we find that a game is very popular, we can then pay for the appropriate Stencyl subscription and sell the game in the Apple App Store, or for Android devices in the Google Play store. We can learn how to use Stencyl and develop games for free to see if people like them, before paying for an annual subscription!

If you are a member of the Apple iOS Developer program, games can be created and tested for the Apple iOS devices with the free version of Stencyl, but they can't be published to the Apple App Store. In Chapter 10, Targeting Mobile Platforms, we'll look in more detail at the options available, and the requirements for publishing to mobile devices running iOS and Android.

In order to follow the game development tutorials in this book, only the free version of Stencyl is required. Subscriptions to Stencyl are only necessary for publishing to mobile devices and desktop applications.

The following matrix shows the major differences between the free and subscription versions of Stencyl:

Please note that the previous matrix provides only a summary of differences between the available versions of Stencyl. It is vital to check the Stencyl website (www.stencyl.com) for the latest features prior to making a purchasing decision, as the feature list may have been updated since publication.

The listed games are a very small sample of the successful games that have been published using Stencyl. The Stencyl website contains areas dedicated to showcasing games, and it's certainly worth visiting Stencyl Showcase for inspiration, and to see some examples of impressive games that have been created with Stencyl.

Let's look at how to install Stencyl on each of the three desktop platforms that it supports: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

We have just downloaded the latest version of Stencyl for Windows, and the installation is now complete. If you want to delete the installation file that you downloaded, then that's fine; it's not needed any more.

We have just downloaded the latest version of Stencyl for Mac OS X, and the installation is now complete.

The stencyl.dmg file can now be unmounted and deleted; it's not needed anymore.

We have just downloaded the latest version of Stencyl for Linux, and the installation is now complete.

The Linux version of Stencyl doesn't really need installing – we just needed to extract the files to create the Stencyl folder so that the application files are accessible.

If you want to delete the original download file, that's fine; it isn't needed anymore.

Now that we have installed Stencyl, the next step is to run a quick test to ensure that everything is working, so we can then dive into the next chapter and create our first game.

We have created an account so that we can access the important features of Stencyl. The same account credentials can be used to log in to the Stencyl forums at community.stencyl.com.

You do not need to sign in and out of the Stencyl application each time you use it, because your login details are remembered unless you specifically choose to sign out using the File | Sign Out option in the Stencyl menu.

Why not visit the Stencyl community forums and say hello?

Fire up your web browser and visit community.stencyl.com, sign in to the forums using the account details that you have just created, and have a browse.

You could go to the Chit Chat forum, find the topic entitled Introduce Yourself!, and well, introduce yourself!

Now that we have installed Stencyl, it would be a good idea to carry out a test so that we know that everything is working as it should be.

We just loaded a game into Stencyl and compiled it for the first time! Compilation is the process of converting the Stencyl game-code into a format that will run on our target platform. The default target platform is Flash, so when the compilation process has finished, the game will be displayed in an Adobe Flash Player window.

It's important to be aware that the sample games are not completed projects – they are just examples that have been provided so that we can see the kind of games that can be created. We can also use the samples to understand how the games have been put together, which is a great way to learn!

We've loaded and compiled one sample game and have had a play, so why not try some of the other sample games that have been provided?

Before we can open up another game, we should close the Adobe Flash Player window in which the previously tested game is running, and we must close the current game in Stencyl by clicking on File | Close Game and follow any prompts that appear.

Now, experiment with the other sample games, so that you become comfortable with the process of loading, testing, and closing games in Stencyl.