Developing a cool game generally requires advanced programming skills. Stencyl provides a platform for creating games on iOS, Android, Flash, Windows, Mac or Linux without writing a line of code. It provides a simple drag and drop interface that will get you creating ideas faster. In this tutorial, we’ll take a sneak peak into what Stencyl is all about. During this tutorial, we’ll see how to add characters and scenes to a game and how to define their behaviours.
Stencyl’s engine is developed using Haxe and based on OpenFL which explains its multi-platform support. Stencyl is free for flash publishing and requires a license to publish on other platforms. Although games can be created without coding, you can still write code if you want or need.
Getting started
We’ll be using Linux for this tutorial. You can download Stencyl from the official download page. Once the download is complete, navigate to the extracted folder and start stencyl:
cd Stencyl
./Stencyl
If all works well then you should see something like the below:
When we develop a game, it will have a scene where things happens and actors who act their characters behaviours. Let’s start by creating our first actor and defining it’s behaviour.
You can download the final tutorial game from GitHub here.
Creating actors
To create a game either click in the middle of the screen or on the green Create a New Game button in the top right hand side of the screen. You will be asked what kind of game to create, select Blank game. Type a name for your game, for example HelloStencyl, leave the screen as default and click Create.
You will now be prompted to create a scene for your game. Name it MyScene and select a background color. Now, you can see two tabs, a dashboard tab and a MyScene tab. Click on the dashboard tab. In the left hand side menu, under Resources you can see Actor Types. Click on the create button to create a new Actor Type. Name it Popeye. An actor type has an animation, click to create one. Name this animation Popeye_Right. Here is an image you can use to add the animation frame:
Here is how your screen should now look.
Save your work and switch to the MyScene tab. Towards the right side of the screen, you should see the Palette tab. Click it and you should see the Tiles and Actor tab. Click the Actor tab, select the Popeye image and place it on MyScene by clicking on the screen. Save your work and click on the Test Game button in the right upper corner of the screen. If all goes well, you should be able to see the game scene as shown below:
Adding Events
Next, we’ll add some behaviours to our actor. With the actor selected, press the right arrow key, it should move forward and on pressing left it should move backward. Click on the actors’ object tab and select the Events tab. On the left hand side, there is a button to add an event. Clicking on Add Event will display a menu. From the menu select Input and from Input select Keyboard. Here is how the code block should look:
Click on Control, which will show Choose Control, clicking on that will ask you to select a control. Select right from the list of controls. Next, from the right side palette select the motion tab, select a second code block and drag it into the existing code block. Here is how it should look now:
Next we need to set the speed of motion to zero when the right key is released. So add a new keyboard event and set the code block as shown below:
Now, test the game by clicking on the test game link. On pressing and releasing the right arrow key the actor should move forward. Next we need to set the left arrow key press to make the actor move backward. So, add another keyboard event as shown below:
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