Stencyl platformer how to#
Stencyl platformer free#

In fact, in the start window it will recommend that you start a game tutorial to create the preset project ‘Crash Course’, the resources for which can be downloaded from the official website to import them right into your project. Stencyl holds your hand all the way through your first project. The flow of each script is brilliantly represented such that the control structures you use can be digested more easily, since you can interpret them visually. Perhaps the most ‘complicated’ thing (but this is very much in airquotes) is the pseudolanguage, although this is only the case for people who’ve never seen a programming language in their lives, as with even the most minimal understanding of algorithms you can do whatever you like. If you’re inserting a sound effect it will specify the shape and the format if you’re inserting a tileset to use in your scenes you’ll have a crop assistant so you can select the size of the different blocks… and so on.

There are assistants for everything and nothing is left to the devices of the user in terms of trying to understand the mechanics. In the attached images you can see how someone has created the control logic for the bird in Flappy Bird, so you could insert that into your game and it will come with a preset behavior that you can link with the rest of the elements in your project.

Stencyl platformer free#

All these resources can be entered externally using the intuitive drag-and-drop system to specify how each element behaves, but if you go to StencylForge (the platform’s free resource market), you can insert into your own game resources that have been created and shared by other users. These include: actors, backgrounds, sources, scenes, sounds, and tilesets, as well as behaviors related to actors, scenes, and the general logic of the game overall. In fact, this flexibility is what provides the logic for the axis that we’ll explain in greater detail below: the Stencyl store.Ī project is divided into modules, with elements listed independently. In other words, if you create a behavior for an enemy in your game, you can easily export that to any other project, as the Stencyl structure was designed exactly for that purpose. Stencyl plays with the idea of object-oriented programming languages in that it distributes the parts of your project as completely modular and independent entities.

Stencyl platformer how to#

Obviously the Internet provides an inexhaustible heap of knowledge to delve into any tool, but the learning curve is always more accessible if someone holds your hand through the first steps, not to mention that in the realm of software development doing your preliminary reading is almost as important as knowing how to handle code.

The main obstacle faced by amateur developers when starting with a framework of this sort is fear of the unknown, that abyss of nothingness where you have to start molding your project from zero. It would be madness to try to present all the potential of this tool in a single article, so here we’re going to limit ourselves to providing an orientation for Stencyl users as to its enormous possibilities. Development environments focused on video games are a dime a dozen, as we’ve seen before, but Stencyl is undoubtedly one of most balanced tools out there in terms of good results and ease of use.