Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide: You don't need to know anything about game development or computer programming when you use the Stencyl toolkit. This book guides you through the whole process of creating a game, publishing and profiting from it.

When starting a practical activity in the book, we can either continue in Stencyl, using our progress from the previous tutorial or, if we are coming back to the book after a break, we can load the last version of the game that we saved at the end of the previous session.

If we want to start afresh at the beginning of a practical activity, we can import the appropriate downloaded game file into Stencyl, so we know that we are starting at the right point in the game development process!

Before each practical activity, there will be a note advising which Stencyl game file should be imported prior to starting the exercise, but it's not necessary to use the import files if we are following the tutorials consecutively.

It's very easy to import a Stencyl game file—just load up Stencyl and, on the main menu, go to File | Import Game…, then double...

We'll start by setting up Stencyl with a new, blank game to work with.

We are starting with a blank game, so there's no need to import a game file!

Every game needs a "world" in which to play, and this is where we will start to build our game. We already know that our game is going to be based in the jungle. So, let's take the next step and create a world for our monkey to play in.

The Dashboard should currently be displayed on the screen and, if we look at the left-hand side panel, under the heading RESOURCES, we can see a list of the types of resources that can be used in our game. The fourth item in the list is Scenes, and it should be highlighted, which is helpful, because the next step we are going to take is to create a scene for our game.

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_01.stencyl.

We don't have any objects in our game yet, so we can't do anything interesting with our scene. Our next step is to insert a controllable character into our game and, as mentioned at the start of this chapter, our main character is going to be a monkey—so let's find that monkey!

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_02.stencyl.

We're going to add a character into our game, right now, by downloading it from Stencyl's online resource, which is called StencylForge .

The Dashboard in Stencyl is the control center—it's where we will find all the resources in our game, whether they are scenes, actors, or any of the other resources that we'll be working with throughout the game development process.

It's a good idea to become familiar with Dashboard, so click on the Dashboard tab and note that the Actor Types heading and the Scenes heading both have a digit 1 next to them. This is telling us that there is currently one actor and one scene in our game, so it's a useful way to know, at a glance, what resources we have in a game that we are developing.

We have a jungle scene, and we have downloaded our monkey actor, so let's do the right thing and put the monkey in the jungle using Stencyl's Scene Designer!

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_03.stencyl.

We need to ensure that the Animation Editor is displaying the monkey animation so, click on the Actor Types heading in the Dashboard, then double-click the Stencyl Book Monkey thumbnail in the main panel.

So far, we have a scene with a single actor placed on it, so now would be a good time to test the game to make sure that we know what we have achieved in the development process!

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_04.stencyl.

Fortunately, Stencyl makes it very easy—and quick—to test our games:

Currently, our monkey is floating in midair, which doesn't present the player of our game with a very interesting scene! We need to build some scenery, made from tiles, so that our monkey can run and jump on something.

Once again, we're going to visit StencylForge and search for some resources that we can use in our game, so let's get on and do that:

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_04.stencyl.

What just happened?

In the same way that we downloaded the monkey actor from StencylForge, we have just downloaded a tileset —a collection of predesigned tiles that will help us build our jungle scene.

Note

The tileset that we are using in our game is based on a design by a Stencyl...

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_05.stencyl.

We're currently looking at the Tileset Editor, but we're not going to be using it in this chapter, so we can close the tab and ensure that we are viewing the Scene Designer.

We've already made a lot of progress and have discovered many of Stencyl's game-design features, so let's review what we have achieved so far—we have:

We now have a basic scene layout for our game, but there is currently a vital element of the game that we still need to add.

We can't really call our current creation a game, because there isn't any interaction! Players need to be able to react to what is happening in our game, or it won't be much fun so, in this part of the book, we are going to implement the following gameplay elements:

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_06.stencyl.

Stencyl comes packaged with many useful behaviors—and we first need to tell Stencyl to attach the required behaviors to the relevant objects within our game. In this case, we need to attach a behavior to the monkey actor, so that we can control it with the keyboard.

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_07.stencyl.

Ensure that we can see the attributes for the Run and Jump Movement behavior by opening the monkey actor and clicking on the Behaviors button at the upper-center of the screen.

Let's get the keyboard and animation information into the behavior:

Now that we have attached a behavior to the monkey, and we've configured the behavior to respond to the required key presses and display the appropriate animations, it's time to test our progress so far.

When developing a game, it is advisable to test often—perhaps even after every significant change that is made to the game. This allows us to see when things have gone wrong, and to be able to easily step backwards through any changes and fix anything that we might have done wrong. Of course, testing also enables us to see what has gone right, so we can enjoy the progress that we are making in the development process!

It doesn't cost anything to test a Flash game in Stencyl, and it's a very quick process, which usually takes a few seconds, so why not test as often as we can?

Be aware that when we test...

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_08.stencyl.

Let's test the game so we can see what's going to go wrong!

Clearly things aren't working as we would expect!

To fix our bug, we need to make a single change to the game. Currently, there is no gravity to make the monkey fall to the ground, so we need to make an adjustment to a setting in the Jungle scene.

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_08.stencyl.

Gravity in a game enables actors to fall or float, depending on the configuration that we specify, and we need the gravity in our game to allow the monkey actor to fall—just as it would in a real jungle—so let's make that change to the Jungle scene:

If the Jungle tab isn't visible at the top of the screen, we'll need to open up the Jungle scene first.

Now that we can see the Jungle scene, we can change the required setting:

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_09.stencyl.

We can easily prevent actors from leaving a scene by attaching another behavior, so our next task is to do just that!

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_10.stencyl.

We're going to change the width of the scene, so we need to display the jungle scene's properties:

Rather than losing our monkey off the side of the screen, we're going to ensure that the screen scrolls automatically as he runs.

Once again, behaviors come to our rescue—in just a few clicks, we will have a scrolling scene for our monkey to enjoy.

Scrolling through a scene in Stencyl is easily managed by using the Camera Follow behavior, and we attach the behavior to the actor that we want to follow—in our game, that's the monkey.

The game file to import and load for this session is 5961_02_11.stencyl.

Wow! We've learned a lot in this chapter.

We created a blank game and added a jungle scene. We then downloaded a monkey actor from StencylForge and added a behavior to control it with the keyboard.

The next step was to use StencylForge again, to find an appropriate tileset to create some interesting content for our Jungle scene.

To ensure that the actor couldn't fall off the edge of the scene, we attached the Cannot Exit Scene behavior, and then we attached the Camera Follow behavior to the monkey, so it could run and jump along the whole length of the scene, while the scenery automatically scrolled to keep up with it.

In the final part of the chapter we made the platform game design more interesting and considered some challenges that might make our game more fun to play.

We've made quite amazing progress in just one chapter—we have all the basic mechanics in place for our platform game. However, there are two vital elements missing—we need some enemies to avoid, and we also need a challenge...