Stencyl help, hints, tips and video tutorials
The Stencyl book is nearly here – pre-order discount!
112 weeks ago
The Stencyl book is now only days away from publication, and anyone who pre-orders it from the Packt Publishing web site can get a 20% discount (link below)!
Solving problems in Stencyl – thinking outside the box
13 months ago
I extend my apologies for the lack of blog updates - I’ve been working on my Stencyl 3.0 book for Packt Publishing and almost 70% of the book has been written. I’ll provide a more detailed update in a later post. In the meantime, this is a relatively short post to encourage the use of lateral thinking when a problem needs to be solved in Stencyl. (more…)
Game attributes and Game Saves in Stencyl
05 months ago
In previous tutorials, we’ve had a look at how to use attributes in a Stencyl game, and also how to access attributes in other actors. However, normal attributes are limited to being used within a scene and, once a different scene becomes active, any attribute information created in the earlier scene is lost forever. This is where game attributes come into play! When we need to keep track of information across the whole game – not just a particular scene, game attributes are exactly what we need. In this short tutorial, we’ll have a quick look at how game attributes work, and also how they can be used to save our players’ game information. (more…)
Stencyl Book update
4In my last post to this blog, I announced the upcoming Stencyl book that I am working on for Packt Publishing, provisionally entitled, Stencyl 3.0 Game Development Beginner’s Guide.
Since making that announcement, I have had an amazing number of responses offering encouragement, assistance, sample code, advice as to how the book should be structured, etc. Firstly, I must say how pleased, and grateful, I am to have received such a positive response – it’s a testament to the enthusiasm and generosity of the Stencly community.
I can now provide a little more (but not too much!) information about the format of the book, and its content:
(more…)
Learning Stencyl Game Development – the book!
4I’m pleased (and somewhat excited) to announce that I recently signed a contract with Packt Publishing to write a “Beginner’s Guide” book for Stencyl 3!
The book is aimed at those who are new to game development, but also at experienced developers and designers who want to use a development toolkit that can target multiple desktop and mobile platforms. (more…)
![The [for] code-blocks for Actors](http://d3bd5fj6hffchg.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-for-code-blocks-for-actors-210x182.png)
Getting Attributes from other Actors in Stencyl
48 months ago
In this latest Stencyl tutorial, we’ll have a look at how to retrieve (or ‘Get’) Attribute values from other Actors in your Stencyl game.
Why would you want to do that? It’s very common to need to deduct health points when a collision occurs between a player and an enemy, or to add bonus points when there is a collision with a power-up. If each of the enemies or power-ups has its own value then, somehow, the player is going to have to find out what that value is, so it can carry out the required action. If you read the tutorial about Attributes in Stencyl, you’ll already know that Actors can be programmed to store and modify their own values in an Attribute, but the next step is to learn how to access the values of other actors’ Attributes…
About Stencyl Attributes (and a bit more debugging)!
910 months ago
If you are new to programming and creating games with Stencyl, then attributes might be something that you haven’t learnt how to use yet. However, learning about attributes is vital if you want to progress your Stencyl coding beyond the absolute minimum.
The purpose of this post is to cover the basics of attributes before we move on to more detail about them in a later article.
Debugging in Stencyl : The Debug Console and Runtime Errors (2 of ?)
1111 months ago
This is the second article in a series about debugging errors in Stencyl and, this time, we’re going to look at what ‘runtime’ errors are, and the tools you can use to track them down in your code. If you missed the first article about debugging in Stencyl, I recommend reading that one first (http://www.thestencylblog.com/2012/06/19/debugging-stencyl-part-1/) and coming back to this article later.
Runtime errors are somewhat trickier than the compilation errors that we discussed in the previous article because they do not manifest themselves when you create the game; as the name suggests, they appear at runtime when the game could already be in the hands of the customer!
(more…)
Debugging in Stencyl : How to Help Yourself (1 of ?)!
611 months ago
Debugging (fixing errors in code) is a part of every programmer’s routine; that’s every programmer, including Stencyl developers!
The purpose of this multi-part article is to look at some common errors that occur when developing and, perhaps more importantly, examine how the debugging tools that come with Stencyl can greatly assist the developer in solving problems. Approached methodically, most coding problems can be overcome quite easily and, when they can’t, having the right information to hand before asking for help can greatly improve the chances of a successful outcome. (more…)
Stencyl Events : Do this only once (please)!
8Your player collides with another actor and you want the collision (or another event) to be detected only once in your Stencyl game, but it keeps happening over and over. You’re not on your own; it’s a common problem!
Let’s say that you want the health of the actor to decrease, or you want to add a bonus to your score when the collision occurs, or play a sound. The problem is that the collision is detected multiple times until your player moves away from the actor with which it has collided.
There is a nice, easy solution to this problem, and it uses a single attribute to keep track of whether or not a collision has already occurred. Read on to find out how it works, and learn a little about Stencyl’s debugging tools along the way!
