In Chapter 1, Introduction, I promised that we'd have the basics of a working game in place by the end of this chapter, and I plan to keep my promise!
Throughout this book, we are going to create a platform game, based in the jungle, in which the player will control a cheeky monkey that will have the ability to run and jump around the scene. As our monkey character runs, the screen will scroll horizontally to display more of the jungle and, along the way, there will be various obstacles, some items to collect, and some enemies to avoid.
Although some of the preceding features will be added to our game later in the development process, when we have learned more features of Stencyl, in this chapter, we will put in place many of the basic mechanics of the game.
The skills we will be learning in this chapter are:
- Creating a new game
- Creating a blank scene
- Downloading resources from StencylForge
- Understanding the Stencyl Dashboard
- Adding an actor into a scene
- Downloading and using tiles for scenery
- Using behaviors to interact with our game
- Improving the scene mechanics
- Making the screen scroll
By the end of this chapter, our game should resemble the following screenshot:
When starting a practical activity in the book, we can either continue in Stencyl, using our progress from the previous tutorial or, if we are coming back to the book after a break, we can load the last version of the game that we saved at the end of the previous session.
If we want to start afresh at the beginning of a practical activity, we can import the appropriate downloaded game file into Stencyl, so we know that we are starting at the right point in the game development process!
Note
The game files accompanying each chapter can be found in the Support section of this book's web page at www.packtpub.com.
Before each practical activity, there will be a note advising which Stencyl game file should be imported prior to starting the exercise, but it's not necessary to use the import files if we are following the tutorials consecutively.
It's very easy to import a Stencyl game file—just load up Stencyl and, on the main menu, go to File | Import Game…, then double-click the relevant file.