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

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.

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development Beginner's Guide

Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development Beginner's Guide

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

About the Author

Acknowledgement

Acknowledgement

About the Reviewers

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Introduction

How Stencyl works

How we'll learn to use Stencyl

Why Stencyl is a great development tool

Platforms that Stencyl runs on

What makes Stencyl different

Successful games created with Stencyl

Installing Stencyl and testing the setup

Time for action – downloading and installing Stencyl on Windows

Time for action – downloading and installing Stencyl for Mac OS X

Time for action – downloading and installing Stencyl for Linux

Time for action – creating an account and signing in

Time For action – testing Stencyl

Let's Make a Game!

Let's Make a Game!

Using the downloaded game files

Creating a new game

Time for action – creating a new game

Creating a blank scene

Time for action – creating a blank scene

Downloading resources from StencylForge

Time for action – downloading an actor

Understanding the Stencyl Dashboard

Adding an actor into a scene

Time for action – adding an actor to the jungle scene

Testing the game

Time for action – testing the game

Downloading and using tiles for scenery

Time for action – downloading tiles from StencylForge

Time for action – adding tiles into the scene

Reviewing our progress

Using behaviors to interact with our game

Time for action – attaching a behavior to an actor

Time for action – configuring the behavior

Testing the game

Time for action – testing the game to find a problem!

Improving the scene mechanics

Time for action – adding gravity to the Jungle scene

Time for action – attaching another behavior to the actor

Time for action – increasing the width of the scene

Making the screen scroll

Time for action – attaching the Camera Follow behavior

Detecting Collisions

Detecting Collisions

Working with collision detection in Stencyl

Time for action – enabling the Debug Drawing feature

Modifying an actor's collision shapes

Time for Action – modifying the monkey's collision shapes

Time for action – adding more collision shapes to the monkey

Configuring collision shapes for tiles

Time for action – modifying the collision bounds of a tile

Adding enemies and collectibles

Working with collision groups

Time for action – examining the collision group settings

Time for action – examining the Players and Actors groups

Time for action – creating a collision group for enemy actors

Using collision sensors

Time for action – configuring the fruit as a sensor

Implementing terrain collision shapes

Time for action – adding a terrain collision area to the scene

Creating Behaviors

Creating Behaviors

Creating custom behaviors

Time for action – creating a behavior

Time for action – adding an action and attaching to it an actor

Time for action – adding an event and renaming the behavior

Creating a timed event

Time for action – creating a behavior to drop the statues

Examining screen size and scene size

Time for action – adjusting the drop-location of the statue

Time for action – making the behavior more flexible

Introducing randomness into our game

Time for action – introducing randomness to our behavior

Time for action – making the statues disappear after a delay

Implementing our first special effect

Time for action – making the statues disappear after a delay

Understanding active actors

Time for action – stopping the statues from becoming inactive

Creating a countdown timer

Time for action – creating a countdown timer

Implementing decision making into our game

Time for action – listening for the countdown to reach zero

Repositioning an actor during gameplay

Time for action – creating an event to relocate the monkey

Triggering custom events in our behaviors

Time for action – triggering a custom event

Animation in Stencyl

Animation in Stencyl

Creating an actor using an imported image file

Time for action – importing an image into the Animation Editor

Understanding Stencyl's animation terminology

Importing a ready-made sprite sheet

Time for action – importing a sprite sheet

Fine-tuning an animation's frame durations

Time for action – modifying an animation's frame durations

Editing animation frames

Time for action – editing an existing frame with Pencyl

Time for action – changing the default graphics editor

Using instruction blocks to control animations

Time for action – switching animations with instruction blocks

Implementing tweening with instruction blocks

Time for action – using the grow instruction block

Managing and Displaying Information

Managing and Displaying Information

A review of our progress

Planning ahead – what else does our game need?

Displaying a countdown timer on the screen

Time for action – displaying the countdown timer on the screen

Configuring fonts

Time for action – specifying a font for use in our game

Creating a game attribute to count lives

Time for action – creating a Lives game attribute

Time for action – decrementing the number of lives

Time for action – detecting when Lives reaches zero

Using graphics to display information

Time for action – displaying a timer bar

Counting collected actors

Time for action – counting the fruit

Time for action – detecting when all fruits have been collected

Keeping track of the levels

Time for action – adding a game attribute to record the level

Polishing the Game

Polishing the Game

Adding a background and foreground

Time for action – adding a background to the Jungle scene

Creating a visual special effect

Time for action – making the ground shake

Creating additional levels

Time for action – renaming, duplicating, and modifying a level

Time for action – implementing level progression

Adding a pause feature

Time for action – creating the pause framework

Time for action – implementing the main pause routine

Implementing a level progression routine

Time for action – displaying the message and buttons

Time for action – responding to the player's selection

Creating a game over message

Time for action – modifying the existing banner event

Time for action – displaying the game over banner

Creating a Main Menu scene

Time for action – displaying the introduction scene

Finalizing the game-completed scene

Time for action – implementing the game-completed scene

Implementing Sounds

Implementing Sounds

Adding a jumping sound effect

Time for action – implementing a jumping sound effect

Examining the play sound instruction blocks

Organizing sounds in the game

Adding a pickup sound effect

Time for action – implementing a pickup sound effect

Adding a soundtrack

Time for action – adding a soundtrack

Understanding sound types in Stencyl

Importing sounds into Stencyl

Time for action – importing a sound effect

Publishing and Making Money from Your Games

Publishing and Making Money from Your Games

Publishing to the Stencyl Arcade

Time for action – publishing to the Stencyl Arcade

Making money with in-game advertising

Time for action – inserting an advertisement into our game

Obtaining sponsorship

Improving our opportunities for sponsorship

Targeting Mobile Platforms

Targeting Mobile Platforms

Understanding testing versus publishing

Considering certification requirements

Examining platform differences

Testing on a mobile device

Time for action – testing on an Android device

Time for action – testing on an iOS device

Utilizing the accelerometer

Time for action – experimenting with the accelerometer

Time for action – creating an accelerometer-controlled game

Implementing touchscreen controls

Time for action – implementing touchscreen controls

Exploring additional mobile device features

Planning, Resources, and Legal Issues

Planning, Resources, and Legal Issues

The planning process

Third-party tools

Third-party assets

Additional resources

Progressing with Stencyl game development

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

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4 star

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3 star

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2 star

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1 star

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Time for action – testing on an Android device

A game file is not required for this session. We're going to create a blank game for our initial mobile test.

Attach the Android device to the development PC using the appropriate USB cable.
Open Stencyl and create a new game called Mobile Testing Android.
Create a new scene called Test Scene, and set the Background color to Light Turquoise.
In the main Stencyl toolbar, select Android in the target device drop-down box next to the Test Game button, as shown in the following screenshot:
Ensure that Stencyl's Log Viewer window is open: View | Log Viewer in the main Stencyl menu.
Click on Test Game.
Follow any prompts to download and install the relevant software development kits (SDKs), which may be required if not already installed on the computer.
After the installation of any required SDKs, there may be a prompt to restart Stencyl. So quit and restart Stencyl, load the Mobile Testing Android game, ensure the Log Viewer window is open, and test the...