![]() All in all, I like Stencyl because it’s cross-platform compatible, powerful, exports to an easily sharable format, is free, and allows you to use your own art/audio. A good game library may give you some of what Stencyl does for you, but it probably won’t do it all for you. You also have a lot of built in functionality, like collision detection, physics, drawing animations, etc, that you would need to write yourself, or use a library, in a text language. The drag-n-drop coding makes syntax errors almost impossible, meaning your code will usually run, even if it doesn’t do what you expect. Of course, whether it is or not depends a lot on what you’re trying to do with it, but it still gives you a lot over text coding. This may raise the question of why Stencyl is better than text-based coding. Stencyl provides you with a lot of flexibility and power, and the cost of that is complexity. There are a LOT of blocks, and a lot of ways to put blocks together that don’t do anything useful. Unlike Scratch, you probably aren’t going to be able to slap some blocks together and make something work. (The weren’t really around when I started teaching Stencyl a few years back.) This is really important, as Stencyl does have a bit of a learning curve. Stencyl does provide learning resources through the Stencylpedia, although I’ll admit I haven’t used them much. You can export an Actor using the button on the lower right. You can have as many scenes as you want, and then setup transitions between them using code.Īll the Actors in this game. Scenes can also have behaviors, for those things that don’t really belong on an actor. Stencyl also allows you to build levels, called “scenes”, and place your actors or elements from a tileset. You can then define behaviors for actors to make them actually do things. Once a sprite, called an “actor” or tileset is created, it’s not hard to give them physical properties, including friction. Basic game concepts like collisions, physics, and inputs are already built in to Stencyl. ![]() Stencyl will run on Windows, Mac, or Linux. The only limitation on the free version is that you can only publish games for the web (.swf format), and games have a Stencyl splash screen. The free version of Stencyl is not in any way limited in functionality from the Pro (paid) versions. I sometimes describe it as a cross between Scratch and Game Maker it has the lego-style coding blocks like Scratch, as well supporting common game making concepts like levels, sprites with animations and behaviors, tilesets, “solid” objects, basic physics, and the like. Stencyl is a drag-n-drop style game making program. This week (December 10) our topic is #HourOfCode. Join us for our weekly chat Wednesday night at 7pm EST. Guest blog post by for the #EdTechBridge series in support of Computer Science Education Week.
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