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 – enabling the Debug Drawing feature


The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_03_01.stencyl.

Stencyl makes it incredibly easy to see how collision detection is configured within our game; all we have to do is use the Enable Debug Drawing feature.

  1. On the main menu in Stencyl, select Run | Enable Debug Drawing.

  2. Test the game.

  3. Navigate the monkey around the scene and take note of where the colored lines appear around the monkey and the tiles.

  4. Close the Adobe Flash Player window.

What just happened?

We've enabled the option that displays the debug drawing feature in Stencyl. When we tested the game with debug drawing enabled, we could see that colored lines are drawn around the monkey actor and the tiles.

These lines, which are normally invisible to players of our game, are used by Stencyl to determine when collisions have occurred, that is, when the lines of any two objects intersect (or touch) each other. If we examine some of the colored lines more closely, we can...