Ive tried looking for a post but no one has seemed to been talking about it. Stencyl has been released a while ago and it actually looked like it was worth a try, for those who dont know it makes flash games, and is free. It might not be the next MMF, but I was actually suprised by its power. Though it takes a good while to get used to and learn everything.
Thoughts anyone?
I was quite eagerly anticipating it for a while, but then completely lost interest when they announced it wouldn't make hardware accelerated standalone windows games. I have zero interest in making Flash / iOS games.
From what they told me when I posted on their forums (a long while back now), the main focus would be on sharing resources (graphics, etc), and they freely admitted it wouldn't be able to compete with MMF2/Construct/etc in terms of performance and versatility.
Looks like a great tool for kids to use though - probably more accessible than MMF2.
Yeah sharing graphics/sounds/etc is promoted, you can also import your own of course and not share anything. I think it is a decent tool if you are in to making flash games though, but not being able to make standalone games does sort of kill it..
You can export your games to facebook and kongregate, so if your able to make anything decent, your games might be easy to share?
Your just jealous that you're not as awesome as me.
(And my megaman avatar )
It is easy to import your own frames, and it does come with an editor to make frames, but it just opens a 'paint'like program. I wouldn't say it sucks though.. but it does have its fair share of problems.
Your just jealous that you're not as awesome as me.
(And my megaman avatar )
I'm quite interested in making Flash games, and it seems like a nice program, not least for being free. But my gut feeling from the hour I spent fiddling is that any halfway seasoned MMF user is going to find themselves running up against walls in more than a few areas.
Originally Posted by marky_2 It sucks . It doesn't even have an in-built picture editor.
Are you being serious?
MMF2's picture editor sucks. There are so many free image editors that are so much better, I don't really know why they bothered.
Actually, I'm currently testing every free raster image editor I can find, as research for an article - although I'll only review 3-4 of the best ones, plus MMF2's picture editor and MS Paint (trying to show MMF2/Paint users the error of their ways).
Originally Posted by marky_2 It sucks . It doesn't even have an in-built picture editor.
Are you being serious?
MMF2's picture editor sucks. There are so many free image editors that are so much better, I don't really know why they bothered.
Actually, I'm currently testing every free raster image editor I can find, as research for an article - although I'll only review 3-4 of the best ones, plus MMF2's picture editor and MS Paint (trying to show MMF2/Paint users the error of their ways).
mmf2's picture editor really is a piece of shit which is so disappointing. i love opening mmf 1.5 - doing silly sprites in it and then make a game with it. it just works nicely while there is so much wrong with MMF2's picture editor. enjoy yourself importing graphics for example.
So I'm looking forward to that article.
Also is Stencyl free? I think I'll give it a try then. Thing is: people IGNORE stand alone games. I've made really really crappy MMF flash games in just 2 hours for the lulz and they got more than 6k views while I have seen EPIC GAMES on TDC and they get totally ignored / only like 200 downloads. compare 200 > 6000 and I didn't even put any efford or anything into that crap.
The examples that came with Stencyl were pretty much horrible. They should have put at least some effort on them, as its the first thing one does after downloading the software? Still have to take a deeper look into it, but it seems pretty capable after a quick look on the games on the site.
About image editors, pick Graphics Gale for pixel stuff, the free version make sprite sheets if you can import them easily or you can just copy-paste stuff in other editor like the mmf one. Right-click color picking pwnzor everything else.
I believe the demos were mostly made by users of the private betas, rather than the developers of Stencyl itself, so it would have been a learning experience for them. You wouldn't expect anyone to come up with a decent game in MMF2 either, if they hadn't been using it for long.
As for GraphicsGale - it's really not very good. The animation features are quite nice, but as a general pixelart app it's well below average, and for any other graphics work it would be completely useless (but fair enough, it was only designed for pixelart). You'd be better off using a decent graphics app with a plugin to add the animation support.
I use a combination of MSPAINT and GIMP wonderful programs, but who actually cares? I just need to create an animation sheet and want to have an alpha channel. Almost all programs will let you do that, the alpha channel is the only real condition and all other features from an editor is just a bonus.
Anyway that Stencyl programs looks nice, I haven't tried it, but building with blocks instead of coding could be a great way for educational use.
Edit on 2011-07-20 by Jenswa
It seems that Stencyl actually is a clone of http://scratch.mit.edu/ but only better and for games.
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Edited by -MacAdaM-
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. It doesn't even have an in-built picture editor.
They should have put at least some effort on them, as its the first thing one does after downloading the software? Still have to take a deeper look into it, but it seems pretty capable after a quick look on the games on the site.
jenswa.neocities.org