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

Understanding testing versus publishing


One of the most amazing features of the free version of Stencyl is that it enables developers to develop games for and to test games on all the supported platforms listed as follows:

  • Flash (desktop Player and web browser)

  • HTML5 (web browser)

  • Microsoft Windows (desktop)

  • Mac OS X (desktop)

  • Linux (desktop)

  • iOS (iPhone / iPad / iPod touch)

  • Android (tablets / smartphones)

For more details about the supported versions of each of the above platforms, please refer to Chapter 1, Introduction, and for the very latest information, visit www.stencyl.com.

Before we learn how to use the mobile development tools available to us in Stencyl, it's important to understand the difference between testing and publishing games.

Testing games with the free version of Stencyl

When we develop a game in Stencyl, we not only design and create the game, but we also test it. During the development of our Monkey Run game, we were testing it using the desktop Flash Player application. When...