Book Image

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By : INNES BORKWOOD
Book Image

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide

By: INNES BORKWOOD

Overview of this book

Creating video games has traditionally been a long and complicated process, requiring years of experience and a vast array of skills. However, with the introduction of comprehensive game-development toolkits such as Stencyl, the fun has returned to the art of game-creation ‚Äì anyone who has the desire to create their own video game can now do so with almost any desktop computer and a free software download from the Internet!Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide will put you on the fast-track to learning the essentials of the powerful Stencyl game-development toolkit. You will develop a complete, ready-to-publish video game including in-game advertising, by following the clear, step-by-step tutorials, supported by numerous screenshots and practical examples.This book will guide you through all the important steps required to develop and publish your video game. Starting with the installation and testing of the Stencyl toolkit, you will very quickly advance to the fun and exciting process of creating a playable game. The step-by-step tutorials will guide you from a blank screen, right through to giving your game that final polish and sharing it with the rest of the world. Whilst developing your feature-complete video game, you will learn how to easily detect collisions in your game using Stencyl's built-in physics engine. You'll discover how to use the powerful animation tools included in Stencyl's toolkit, and you'll find out how to make your game shine with sounds and visual special effects. You will also discover how Stencyl makes it easy to utilize the touch-screen and accelerometer features of smartphones and tablet computers. You will learn all the essential skills required to develop a video game from scratch ‚Äì right through to publishing a game on the Internet and testing games  on the most popular mobile devices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – creating an account and signing in


Although it is not a requirement to sign in to create games with Stencyl, we won't be able to publish any games, access StencylForge, or contribute to the Stencyl online forums without an account.

In order to follow the tutorials in this book, we'll need access to StencylForge, and we'll also need to be able to publish our games, so I highly recommend creating a Stencyl account and signing in.

  1. Run Stencyl and the following screen will be displayed:

  2. If you do not see the sign-in screen, ensure that you have Stencyl running, and select File | Sign In on the main menu at the upper-left corner of the Stencyl screen.

    Note

    If you have already signed up for an account on the Stencyl forums, you do not need to create a separate account in order to log into Stencyl. The Stencyl application login and the Stencyl forum login use the same credentials; so, you can sign in to Stencyl without any further action!

  3. Click on Create an Account and enter your username, password, and e-mail address in the right-hand side of the dialog box shown as follows. Note that Stencyl usernames and passwords are restricted to alphanumeric characters (letters and numbers only).

    Note

    Choose your username carefully as it will be your permanent Stencyl login name and username on the Stencyl online forums!

  4. When you are confident that you have entered the correct details, click on the Sign Up button, and after a few seconds a confirmation message will be displayed as shown in the following screenshot:

  5. Click on OK to confirm, and we are ready to start using Stencyl!

What just happened?

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.

Have a go hero

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!

Testing the Stencyl installation

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.