I'm very excited to announce to the Stencyl community that I have completed work on Stencyl Essentials, and that is has been published by Packt Publishing and is now available in digital and paperback formats from Amazon, Google Play etc. along with the Packt website itself.
It has not been written as a replacement for Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide, by Innes Borkwood, which is an excellent reference material for Stencyl game development, written by a very competent Stencyl user. Rather, the purpose of the book is to provide a fast paced text, targeting those with basic computer skills and/or some computer science/computer programming experience. It cuts out a lot of the ancillary content which would usually have to be covered in a beginners guide, speeding up the learning experience for Stencyl-centric topics. It has also been designed to function as a handy reference work for teachers working with Stencyl in the classroom.
Hence, Stencyl essentials is best suited to people who are either:
- new to Stencyl, but not completely new to programming, or
- have been using stencyl for a short while, and perhaps even read the Beginners Guide, but want to learn some more sophisticated programming techniques (Stencyl Essentials will teach this)
Some of the key takeaways for the reader are:
- Modifying the shipped behaviors to fit your own custom requirements
- Writing your own behaviors from scratch, and working with the various event types
- Writing custom events and utilizing them extensively to create smarter, and more readable code
- Writing custom blocks, which accept parameters to perform various functions
- Using attributes, and game attributes, in all kinds of clever and useful ways
- Writing and utilizing complex conditional logic
- Building detailed level geometry using tilesets
- Designing control systems that suit both Desktop and Mobile targets (PC, Mac, Linus, iOS and Android)
It was a great pleasure for me to write a book on the wonderful Stencyl game engine, and it is my sincerest hope that this work will aid many more students, hobbyists, educators and developers in learning (or, teaching) game development.
For more information about the book as well as purchasing options, please visit us at CMG Academy on the following page: