Many successful games for Flash and mobile devices have been created with Stencyl. In some cases, they have been created by experienced developers who have switched to Stencyl to speed up the development process, and in other cases, the games have been developed by newcomers to game development, who had previously been unable to create their own games due to the complexity of traditional programming languages, or who had simply not attempted to create a game previously.
Following are three examples of successful games that were created using Stencyl:
- Making Monkeys: Making Monkeys is an original, fun, platform game created by Greg Sergeant of greg-anims.com. The idea of the game is that very weird-looking monkeys can use a special weapon to duplicate themselves and solve various puzzles. Making Monkeys was sponsored by Armor Games and has gained over 1 million game plays.
Greg has stated that it only took him a few days to create the prototype of the game and that Stencyl enabled him to try out new gameplay elements very quickly.
- Kreayshawn Goes to Japan: The first game that Beth Maher (www.bethmaher.com) created was called Kreayshawn: The game. The game, shown in the following screenshot, was created by her with Stencyl during a workshop project that was designed to encourage women to become involved in the indie game industry.
The development of this fan game led to Beth working with Columbia Records (part of the Sony group of companies) to produce Kreayshawn Goes to Japan, for Kreayshawn's fan website (arcade.kreayshawn.com). The game is a bright, imaginative platform game featuring Kreayshawn as the main character.
- Impossible Pixel: Impossible Pixel and the Fate of Destiny, created by 99 Up Games, is a challenging platform game with 93 levels, available on iPad and iPhone. This game takes advantage of the touchscreen features provided by iOS; the buttons for controlling the player can be seen in the lower-left and lower-right corners of the following screenshot:
At the time of writing, Impossible Pixel, according to the developer's figures, had been downloaded from the Apple App Store approximately 700,000 times and had reached the position of the most popular free download on the App Store in nine countries. It was also the second most popular free download in thirty other countries, including the US App Store.
Impossible Pixel includes many professional features including Game Center achievements, high score leaderboards, atmospheric retro soundtrack, and many interesting challenges throughout the game.
The listed games are a very small sample of the successful games that have been published using Stencyl. The Stencyl website contains areas dedicated to showcasing games, and it's certainly worth visiting Stencyl Showcase for inspiration, and to see some examples of impressive games that have been created with Stencyl.