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 – downloading and installing Stencyl on Windows


In this session, we're going to download and install Stencyl on Windows:

  1. Visit www.stencyl.com.

  2. Click on the Download Now button on the home page.

  3. Depending on which web browser you are using and how you have configured it, the latest Stencyl installation file will start to download automatically, or you may have to confirm that you accept the download and specify the download location.

  4. When the installation file has downloaded, find it in Windows Explorer and double-click it to start the installation process. You can see the dialog box shown in the following screenshot:

  5. Click on Next to accept the default installation folder.

  6. Click on Install to set the installation process running. Usually, the installation process will take less than a minute to complete, but the time may vary depending on the specification of your computer.

  7. When the installation has completed, click on Next again to display the final dialog box shown in the following screenshot:

  8. I recommend clicking on the Run Stencyl option to remove the checkmark so Stencyl does not run automatically.

  9. Click on Finish to complete the installation of Stencyl.

Note

Because of the system access that Stencyl requires, you may need to run Stencyl as the Administrator on a Windows PC when updating or the first time after purchasing a subscription. This can easily be achieved by right-clicking on the Stencyl application icon and selecting Run as administrator.

What just happened?

We have just downloaded the latest version of Stencyl for Windows, and the installation is now complete. If you want to delete the installation file that you downloaded, then that's fine; it's not needed any more.

Note

When running Stencyl for the first time, we are asked to sign in. The signing in process is the same for all platforms and is detailed under the heading, Creating a Stencyl account, (after the Linux installation procedure in this chapter).

Mac OS X

Stencyl will currently install on all versions of Mac OS X, but it should be noted that Java 6 must be installed in order for Stencyl to work.

Note

At the time of writing, Java 6 was a mandatory requirement for correct operation of Stencyl; Java 7 is not compatible.

The download and installation methods are the same for each version of Mac OS X, but the following screenshots have been captured in Mac OS X 10.7.4.