It was a tight race with an unprecedented number of fun and polished entries, but Tiny Touch Tales’s Tiny Tomb Robber (how’s that for a tongue twister!) managed to claim the top prize from our judges.
Hypnohustla’s Quantum Core and Dincicode’s NeoCon TD followed close behind to attain second and third place prizes, respectively.
Check out our forum post for a full list of winners, including honorable mentions, and if you haven’t already…
This year’s Stencyl Game Jam has been a resounding success, bringing in a whopping 88 qualifying submissions (including 11 mobile games) from new and veteran Stencyl users alike. There are a number of truly stand-out titles spanning multiple genres, including platformer, strategy, RPG, action, and casual.
Judging is gonna be a difficult (but fun!) process, and we’ll announce the prize winners right here in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime…
To accommodate our ever-increasing international user base, we’ve taken a huge step and made Stencyl 3.0 fully translatable via a brand new online translation tool.
Previous versions of Stencyl contained large quantities of text that weren’t translatable at all and shipped with only a handful of translations at various levels of completion. For 3.0, we decided to take a giant step back and comb through all text in the app, making nearly 4,000 terms translatable, and improving support for international characters.
As you might imagine, translating 4,000 terms would be quite an undertaking for any one person, and indeed, translating the whole app from start to finish has always proven to be a roadblock. Many of our users who had been gracious and eager to help simply weren’t able to devote enough time to translate the whole app at once, and translations fell into disarray.
We knew we’d have to take a different approach in order to make translating Stencyl as easy as possible. Rather than take the easy way out and rely on robotic (and error-prone!) machine translations, we built an online translation tool from the ground up that enables anyone to contribute as many or as few terms as they’d like! Users can translate phrases one at a time and can vote or comment on proposed translations from others. Each language is appointed a moderator who can approve a phrase for inclusion in Stencyl.
Users won’t have to wait until we release an update to Stencyl to grab the latest translations. As soon as a phrase has been approved by a language moderator, users can immediately update their language packs from within Stencyl to pick up the latest changes.
It’s been less than a month since we launched the feature, and we already have two finished translations (Traditional Chinese and Slovak) and four others that should be finished within a couple of weeks (German, French, Spanish, and Russian). Another four are top-priority for us (Simplified Chinese, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Standard Portuguese), and fifteen others are at various stages of completion.
We’re thrilled to be able to welcome such a diverse group of audiences from all over the world and hope this important step will enable new audiences, such as students in non-English speaking countries, to fully embrace Stencyl.
If you’d like to help us fulfill our dream of bringing game creation to everyone, click on over to our translation tool and give it a try!
Would you like to help translate Stencyl into a language that isn’t listed? Post about it in our forums!
Richard Sneyd, an experienced game design lecturer and course coordinator at Clane College in Ireland, is running a brand new Udemy course entitled “Create your First Computer Game with Stencyl.”
At present time, the course is divided up into seven sections, consisting of 39 lectures and three quizzes, covers a variety of basic and advanced topics, and culminates with students creating a full game, complete with physics and destructible environments. He plans on adding more material as time goes on.
Richard introduced Stencyl to his game design class last year and decided to develop a full-blown curriculum that he could share online. Here’s what he had to say:
I’ve been teaching computer game development & design with Stencyl to my full-time students since version 1.0, & have been blown away by how much they can accomplish within the first 3 months of the course, thanks to Stencyl’s signature visual programming language. Stencyl makes game development accessible to pretty much everyone, that’s what I love about it. If you have enough commitment, you can learn to create games with Stencyl. What’s more, there are little-or-no limitations on the kinds of games that can be created. And, with platforms like HTML5, Android & IOS being supported, indie development with Stencyl is a very real prospect for most anyone with the passion and desire to make it happen.
To get to that point, however, one must learn the fundamentals of what makes Stencyl tick, & that’s what this new online course does — it teaches you everything you need to know to start building production quality, full-functional games with Stencyl. From one lesson to the next, working on several game development projects (top down, platformer etc) you will build a solid skill-set & knowledge base which you will then utilise for your own development projects. New features in Stencyl 3.0 will also be covered. Now there’s no excuse, anyone can build their dream game with Stencyl!
For a limited time, Richard is offering a 50% discount on the course exclusively to all Stencyl users by using this coupon link.
Here at Stencyl, we’ve got some very ambitious plans on the education front that we’re very excited to talk about. In the near term, we’re getting ready to roll out a free Educator’s Kit, which will contain some printable materials to help schools get up and running quickly with Stencyl. We’ll share more about this soon.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with some great educators like Richard, and we’d love to hear from any other educators out there who may be looking for a way to tailor Stencyl to their students’ needs.
Last month, Jon Lepage’s Impossible Pixel became the first Stencyl game to hit the number 2 top free app spot in the US App Store.
Now that things have settled down a bit for Jon, I asked him to share his exhilarating story, as well as his plans for the future.
Please introduce yourself.
Well, my name is Jon Lepage, I’m 25 and I’m from France. I’m a graduated Movie Director, believe it or not! I created 99 Up Games in early 2012 and since then, I make games and I love it.
In a paragraph or two, please give a synopsis of Impossible Pixel.
Impossible Pixel is the story of a hero against all odds. Pixel Man’s planet is attacked by hideous and dangerous aliens and he has no other choice than to run. His powers: running, jumping, sliding and a double jump out of the blue. While on his journey to survive he will end up finding the power, literally and figuratively, to fight off the forces of evil and free his people from dark alien experiments.
I actually come from the movie industry and I’ve always been frustrated with how painful the process of writing a movie script was in France, you always had to go through endless rewrites and great projects got stalled rather quickly by the scripts. For this project I wanted to go right to the point, even if it meant adding simple, maybe silly, elements. When you work on video games you have the freedom to go in any direction you want; you have no constraints. I always had in mind: “if birds being annoyed by pigs and plumbers saving princesses are popular, I can have fun with the story of my game” and I tried to do just that and not dwell too much on it, not letting it be a painful process.
How long have you been creating games?
I’ve been making games professionally for a year now. I worked in the movie industry for 3 years in France before going into mobile app opportunities and then games in 2012. But I have to say that movies gave me a solid ground to be able to make and produce games. Movies and games are not that different, production and artistic wise, and we even see the two getting closer and closer with games like Heavy Rain and Call of Duty, where the interaction is as thin as it can be, the storytelling predominant and where realism and cinematography are at the edge of technology. Games, especially on smartphones and tablets, have to be thought out as real productions, just like movies. There are so many game apps out there that you can’t close your eyes and release anything with the hope that it will work or that it will sell on its own. You have to plan it all out.
What brought you to Stencyl?
Emanuele Feronato’s blog. I was working with the Flixel engine on a “2D Dead Space” at the time, which Impossible Pixel originally was supposed to be. I’m looking up online how to do something and I stumble upon this blog, where a link to Stencyl was conveniently placed. I dug deeper and saw that Stencyl was the perfect fit for me: a neat visual interface to create games as complicated as you want if you understand the logic. I immediately jumped on board and since Stencyl allowed me to make and test a game right away I decided to try out my skills on an iPhone game. After a few weeks I began to get a hold of things and decided to go all in.
What influenced your decision to use Stencyl for Impossible Pixel?
I’ve always had this urge to make games. At 14 years old I began to make an RPG on RPG Maker just for my best friend. We were into Blade, Interview With a Vampire and Vampire Bloodlines: The Masquerade back then, right before liking vampires was “cool”. So I made this vampire game. You began as a fresh vampire waking up in the sewers without any memory and you had to come out in a medieval town to figure out what happened to you. I never finished it but I remember being very proud of making a day and night cycle and sunlight that would hurt you while walking outside, all in Snes sprites and graphics of course. But unfortunately I always had problems when working only with code. I’m ok with programming but I have a tough time visualizing the result. I’m a visual guy, I’m impatient and I need to see results immediately; Stencyl allowed me to do just that. I didn’t have to translate pages of code in my mind, I just had to organize logics and behaviors and watch my character move. To be really thorough, I think StencylForge is a wonderful tool and it helped me immensely at the beginning; just seeing and toying with behaviors from other sharers helped me tremendously while getting accustomed to game making.
What challenges did you face during the game’s creation?
Oh boy… A lot! Learning the software, creating sustainable game mechanics, risking the time and money to make the game, making visually appealing art, bringing it to production quality, fixing a lot of bugs, facing the love and wrath of the players, the tough mental meltdown of online critics, failing the release, counting sales, handling the sudden success… Every part of Impossible Pixel’s making was tough and nerve wrecking. But it’s incredibly rewarding. It took me 7 months to release the game and 3 more before it went crazy on the App Store. But when you see your creation on top of the charts, when you receive messages of happy gamers, when your game is featured on websites, everything seems to suddenly fall into place and you feel like you just had to power through to get there. The mental toughness is the main difference between a success and a failure, whether you have money or not. You need to be tough from beginning to end; there is no alternative.
What were your experiences in bringing the game to the App Store?
Long and painful. I’ve released around 10 to 15 apps now, other than Impossible Pixel. Apple is like this omniscient god who has full and unquestionable power over its creation. The App Store is a marvelous platform; it allows small companies to make a living rather easily if they produce quality content. Their share is really fair. They take “only” 30% of the revenue of an app and leave you with 70% of the price. In comparison a movie producer gets 1 € on 9 € movie tickets – same with DVDs, around 11% – of which a smaller amount is given back to the “creators”: directors, composers and writers. From what I heard from friends in the music business, major companies and labels are even worse. So the App Store really is the Eldorado everyone is talking about. But it comes at a price. Like every merciless god, Apple can take life back in a blink of an eye. Their review system is unforgivable and if you send sub-par content, you will fall into the limbo of failing to get your game to go live, and ultimately they will always be right and you’ll have nothing to say in the matter. Producing quality content is the safest bet but you will always be shaking while waiting for their approval.
What was it like working with a sponsor?
This one really was unexpected. AppGratis is quite different from Kongregate or Newgrounds. They don’t buy games. They have no ads to make revenue from. They have no “submit your app” page. AppGratis offers to its users one or two promotions a day and feature apps that go free or on sale for a day only. But their selection process takes place within the privacy of their walls. They have around 9 million users. Big companies try to take advantage of it, and when they to, I believe they get a lot of money out of it.
What happened for me was that I received an e-mail Monday, February 25th, early morning from an AppGratis rep’ stating that they really liked the game and that they wanted to feature it worldwide within their app. No money asked, no counter part. At the time, Impossible Pixel sales were dropping, probably due to the lack of coverage and it being the first game of 99 Up Games, creating uncertainty from users willing to get it. So I figured why not! At the very least I would get some visibility. Followed what followed… The game finished the day as one of the two or three most downloaded free apps in the world with over 680,000 downloads. Reviews were starting to pour in, on the App Store, on iPhone review websites, on Twitter… I wasn’t making any money but the game was making a name for itself. I wasn’t prepared to make money out of this day though, but what follows lies only within my hands and it’s up to me and my work to make it worthwhile.
What are your plans going forward with Impossible Pixel? What about with game creation in general?
The success of Impossible Pixel started an incredible opportunity for me. People now know my game and my brand. I will of course try to improve it further, but it also gives me the credibility to start other projects. And I have a few games cooking that will come out this year. I don’t want to spoil too much but an Impossible Pixel 2 is in the making and I should have a few pretty talented game makers along on the ride with me… I can’t wait to give you more news!
Do you have any advice or tips for indies looking to create a game and achieve success?
Unfortunately I have no recipe for success. I think there is only good, hard work. Canabalt took 1 month to make, Infinity Blade a lot more. Be absolutely certain of the kind of game you want to make. Be sure to make it for the platform you’re aiming at; App Store users are very, very different from Newground visitors. Learn your tools as much as you can. Study similar games, what worked, what didn’t. Don’t invest over your capabilities, whether it’d be time or money, but keep in mind that it is an investment. Make primarily what you think is a quality game. Team up with quality people if you can. But ultimately, everything comes down to finishing the work. You have no chance of making a successful game if you don’t release it!
Thanks to Jon for sharing his story with us and for answering our questions.
Our next success story could be yours! Enter the Stencyl Jam and show us what you’ve got (and maybe win some prizes, too!).
By popular demand, we’ve started up our first game jam of 2013. After our very successful jam with Newgrounds last year, we’re eager to see what you come up with this time around.
Click the banner below for all of the details, including the rules, prizes and submission instructions. Good luck!
Stencyl-made Impossible Pixel is currently the #4 #3 #2 top free app in the US App Store!
This challenging old-school platformer is the result of an eight-month collaboration by Jon Lepage, Jared ’2PLAYER’, and Jonathan Tiong and features 93 levels of fast-action, run-and-jump gameplay. It’s playable on iPhones and iPads and is free today only, courtesy of AppGratis!
In their own words…
From the bottom of the pixel earth to the high skies, dodge traps, avoid pixel monsters and go save the world !
Congrats to the team on their hard work! Download Impossible Pixel now for free, and help it reach #1!
Back in September, I interviewed Greg Sergeant, of Making Monkeys fame, on his upcoming Stencyl game SkullFace, a highly polished action-platformer that’s stunning to look at and really fun to play.
Fast forward three months, and the game has been released. Play it now on Greg’s website.
Greg took some time to reflect back with me on the creation process and to offer some tips to budding game designers who are looking to sink their teeth into the industry.
Please introduce yourself.
Hey I’m Greg Sergeant, aka “Greg-Anims”. I make video games for a living, and it feels absolutely amazing that I can make what I feel compelled to make, totally dive in and chase my passion, then sell the thing and receive tons of feedback; hear from people enjoying (or hating) my work all over the world! I love making games, it’s really frustrating at times, it’s challenging and solitary, but it’s just so interesting. There’s so much to play with: art, audio, animation, interactivity…it’s pretty freaking cool.
In a paragraph or two, please give a synopsis of SkullFace.
SkullFace is about a boy who feels numb after losing his heart and by going through all these insurmountable challenges he is able to get it back. It’s an action platformer in the vein of games like Super Meat Boy and N+, focused on very challenging bite-size levels that make you throw your fist in the air upon finishing one, only to be met with a new obstacle seconds later. I hoped to nail a type of “flow” with the game where you become completely immersed in the challenge and can pull off these lines of movement by rolling, wall-jumping, bouncing and jet-packing, which is a philosophy most of the levels are designed around.
How long have you been creating games?
Hmm, *goes to check*, 6 YEARS!! &#@$! I should have made so much more! I guess I don’t feel compelled to make a game unless it’s pushing on the edge of my ability… so as I’m making the game I’m learning how to make it at the same time. I think learning and growing over the course of a lifetime is more important to me than the reward of finishing one game. Right now I feel like I’m going to be chasing this games thing for a really long time, so over the course of that we might see some really interesting things happen as my comfort zone expands further.
What brought you to Stencyl?
I was looking for Flash-based engines because after programming Bat Country, I wanted to find an easier way… I can’t believe I didn’t know visual scripting existed before then because I would struggle with programming a lot. The game would be broken and I’d be running around MSN asking everyone what I’d done wrong, then it would turn out to be some really simple mistake or syntax error… and this would happen every 10 minutes, haha.
What influenced your decision to use Stencyl for SkullFace?
I started the game as “GrapplePack” with Sam (programmer from Australia). It was going to have a level editor and a grappling-hook, but he got a job and moved to San Francisco; he didn’t have time for the project anymore. I’d always wanted to make a platformer since I first started out, but I didn’t feel I had the ability yet. It’s quite a big challenge to make all the content for a game like this, but then I stumbled across Stencyl and felt I could make it work, which made me feel really excited and that sparked the game.
What challenges did you face during the game’s creation?
Oh man, not sure where to begin on this one… the whole thing! I think the reason I was drawn to make this type of game is because it parallels what makes the developing experience rewarding for me: you come up against a challenge which feels impossible, then you complete it after much failure, then before you have a chance to rejoice and catch your breath another even harder challenge comes up – it’s a journey. It’s difficult to make a game that’s supposed to be very hard because everything needs to feel very precise, very fair; you’ve got less room for error. I watched my friends and girlfriend play the game, taking note of the emotional reactions to certain things, then you go in and smooth off the sharp corners, expand on the bits they loved, then bring them back and watch them play again. It’s very fun, and very iterative.
Just finishing a project, which is “the biggest project you’ve done” is a massive challenge, even if it looks simple to other people. You’re pushing on your comfort zone, and many times something inside you will say, “why are you even doing this, lets do something easier,” and you’ll have to tell that voice to shut up and keep working at it. “Finishing projects” and seeing them through to completion is a skill in and of itself that gets built every time you don’t quit on a game, and it’s probably the most useful skill I’m learning.
What were your experiences in selecting a sponsor?
Not as smooth as my other work. Sponsors are concerned largely with how many clicks their ads will get, and how wide an audience the game will get – not so much with the hundreds of hours you put into level design… they can only play your game for a minute or two because they have so many to get through. I feel like the types of games I want to make are not suited for the sponsorship model anymore, and hopefully in the future I’ll move toward selling the game straight to the players who want it. I’m lucky that there’s always a sponsor interest in my games, but this game didn’t make anywhere near as much as I’d expected, and I’d deem it “a financial failure” despite it being my best work. I guess it was made for the wrong market. Either way, it’s not important in the long run, and it doesn’t change the game which is what matters most to me.
What are your plans going forward with SkullFace? What about with game creation in general?
Trying to get SkullFace in front of as many players as possible. I’m learning Unity engine, and how to make 3D games – I’ll be posting a lot of “behind the scenes” content and 3D prototypes on my blog. Long term goal is to make a really unique and amazing 3D game which people would be willing to buy for a small price, and which could be considered a “serious” gaming experience, something players can talk about, something new.
Do you have any advice or tips for indies looking to create a game and find sponsorship?
I’m going to give a psychological answer to this: Brainwash yourself; you’re surrounded by stimulus and a lot of it is bullcrap. Instead of watching TV, watch your favorite developer interviews, watch Romero talk about how they made Quake in their bedrooms and play the type of games you want to make. The stimulus around you will affect how you think and thus drive your actions, so read books and keep putting inspirational stuff into your head, choose what affects you or be blown about like a leaf in the wind. Cut your hobbies down to what you really love – you can be mediocre at a lot of stuff, or amazing at a few things; the rewards are better for the latter. Keep on “your edge” – chase challenges that are just out of your comfort zone – not so easy that they’re boring, not so difficult that you’re discouraged. Good luck 
Stencyl 3.0 opens the doors to Android publishing and the hundreds of millions of devices powered by it. We’ve pulled all the stops to bring a sensible and efficient workflow for deploying your apps to Android.
Testing on Android is a snap. For testing, you just need any device with Android 2.2 (Froyo) or better.
Just plug your device in and click run.
Once you’re ready to publish, publishing happens locally and outputs an APK that you upload to Google Play or your own site for distribution.
Generating certificates for iOS can be a complex process. Not so on Android, where we’ve simplified the process to a matter of filling a few fields.
A commonly cited challenge in Android development is the so-called “fragmentation” in screen sizes. Thankfully, the solution we came up with for iOS ends up working well here.
Our Universal App support makes an assumption that 480 x 320 is the “base” resolution that all games are designed at. This coincides with the base resolution for the original iPhone or a 1st generation Android device.
Using high-resolution graphics designed at “4x” the base resolution, we’re able to derive graphics sets that work optimally on most devices using scales of 1x/1.5x/2x/4x.
Suppose you’re playing on a Nexus S, which has an 800 x 480 screen. Your game will play at “1.5x”, which is 720 x 480. The excess space will be letterboxed by default, but you can opt to stretch the game or display it in full screen.
All of this would be for naught if it weren’t possible to easily integrate Ads, Purchases and all of the features we already provide for iOS.
Rest assured that you’ll be using the exact same blocks and processes for integrating the essentials in Stencyl 3.0. These include…
Last time, I talked about our improvements to Game Center, Ads, and Purchases through the addition of Events. This time, I’m covering a few more enhancements to our mobile publishing pipeline. These work on both iOS and Android.
At times, it’s useful to display a keyboard in order to support text entry. For example, entering in your name when you achieve a high score. Stencyl lets you show the keyboard for instances like these.
Alerts are modal dialogs that display urgent information to the user. Use them sparingly.
Multi-touch is necessary for games in which you must track different points of independent interaction. For example, a 2-player ice hockey game comes to mind.
Multi-touch was somewhat difficult to work with in Stencyl 2.0. 3.0 introduces a simple, intuitive scheme using events.
This event is triggered any time a touch begins, is dragged around or ends. The ID is consistent throughout the lifecycle of that touch, so you can use that to drive your game’s logic accordingly.
Swiping is a gesture we’re all familiar with. It’s good for scrolling through menus or triggering certain actions. Looks familiar?
Swiping has been improved through the addition of an explicit Swipe event, in addition to the existing boolean block.
You asked for it, and we’ve delivered it. Stencyl supports dual on-screen joysticks, perfect for those top-down action games.
Android is the next major topic in our coverage of Stencyl 3.0.
