I also went through the Stencyl Review and took notes.
“Scenes are where everything in the game takes place.” Scenes don’t always have to be the actual levels, the main menu can actually be a scene. Scenes can be thought of as a story, or states in the game that you transition between. The building blocks of a scene are usually the terrain of the game, which is typically made up of tiles. You can use these tiles and virtually create any kind of landscape. You can also use the custom terrain tool on a game that is not tile-based. You can also create layers in the game to make sure that your main character goes in front of an object instead of behind. You can use the Layers Pane inside the Scene Designer to manage layers. Every element in a scene has a position, which consists of an X (horizontal) and a Y (vertical) component – each corresponds to the top left corner of the element (the higher the X value – moves you towards the right, higher Y value – moves you to the bottom).
Each scene has boundaries that you define which controls how far the camera can travel. Going beyond certain boundaries is either not permitted or leads to death. Scrolling is the act of changing what part of the scene is visible. You can use the “camera follow player” block to have the camera follow the player through the level. The camera can also be moved in two different ways: set the camera’s (x,y) position, make the camera follow and actor (Scene>View>Camera). To make an off screen actor active use (Actor>Properties>Misc.). You can also have the camera follow a dummy actor, which means the player has no control over the camera.
You can create a tile by going to File>Create New>Tileset. Then name it. You will then see a window – 1) Click “Choose Image” to pick out the tile sheet you want to import. 2) Pick out the Tile Width/Height (most cases is 32×32 or 16×16. Click Add to finish the import. You can also animate tiles.
Regions are invisible areas of a scene that detect the actors. Regions could be used for entering doors, healing/hurting zones, stepping on a switch. To create a region – inside the Scene Designer 1) Pick the Region tool. 2) Click and Drag to place the region. Then go to the Events page and add a “Specific Actor Enters Region” event. Then you out the event with your desired values – ex. it detects when the hero enters the region. There are 3 types of regions: squares, circles, and polygons.
Stencyl uses bitmap fonts to display texts, which is a special font that is pre-rendered to pixels. To create a font you use the Font Editor. File>Create new>Font. Heads Up Displays (HUDs) usually display statistics and is a graphical dashboard that is displayed on top of everything else.
Changing a scene involves 3 parts: 1) What scene you want to go to next. 2) The exit transition. 3) The entry transition. In Stencyl you can use 7 different types of transitions: fade, blinds, bubbles, spotlight, blur, box, or crossfade.
You can import music and sounds by going to File>Create New>Sound. You can create looping music for your background. You can create channels when you want to switch the music when hero approaches an obstacle or foe.
To import a background 1) Create a new background. 2) In the background editor, click the dotted box to choose an image. 3) Click Attach to Scene button.
You can customize your actor to do special behaviors. To customize an actor, left click on the actor, and click the Inspector Pane tab on the right of the screen. Then check the “Customize” box. You can 1) Modify an actor’s set of behaviors. 2) Modify the values for those behaviors.
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