Stencyl.org

Here is an unofficial trailer demonstrating games which can be made with Stencyl’s game development kits.

When I first became aware of the existence of the Stencyl project my first thoughts were “great, finally some competition for GameMaker”. Following the formation of YoYoGames, who took over the management of GameMaker, things didn’t appear to be going at all smoothly and I hoped that the introduction of a new open-source alternative would give them a well overdue kick up the backside.

When I read into more detail about what Stencyl offered however I was more than a little disappointed. Far from being a viable game creation alternative to GameMaker it appeared that StencylWorks was aimed more at the novice, I even went as far as to describe Stencyl as a “glorified level editor“. From the screenshots and videos demonstrating what Stencyl could do this did indeed seem to be the case.

GameMaker does have an advantage over Stencyl at the moment that being it already exists and has an active user base, thousands of created games and numerous tutorials, examples, websites providing resources and even two dedicated magazines.

However with Stencyl being open source there is obviously a potential for rapid growth as the community will inevitably write extensions at a quicker rate than the YoYo crew will be able to despite their £1 million (~$1.9M) development budget.

Justin, Stencyl’s PR guy popped in with some info about features that Stencyl would have.

Stencyl is not designed to be a simple level maker. It makes full blown games with a large array of capabilities. At launch you’ll be able to make anything from platformers to turn based strategy games.

Stencyl derives a lot of its power from a robust trigger system (akin to Warcraft 3’s). With triggers you can do many things. That is what most users will use to make their creations, and for most users it will suffice. If you want to make your game go beyond the capabilities that come with Stencyl, then you can program additional capabilities using Java. With Java you can make your own kits, add onto existing ones, or even add onto Stencyl itself (since it is open source as per the BSD license).

The general perception from users of gamemaker is that Stencyl appears to be more basic, perhaps they are just defending gamemaker, who knows - however i did reach the same conclusion. Ultimately it looks like we will have to wait for the first general release of Stencyl to see whether Stencyl’s more advanced features turn out to be as promised.

This is an unofficial trailer of StencylWorks, the editor, and a Mario and Mega Man game which have been created with it.

Stencyl is the free open-source game development and distribution platform for everyone.

Making and sharing games has never been easier or more fun. Developers can create game kits which can be integrated into Stencyl with the software development kit (SDK).

Stencyl.org will provide the latest Stencyl news and resources in the form of a blog.