Reasons I moved away from Stencyl
A while back I hit some walls in Stencyl which caused me to move to Construct 2.
There was some big issues like the lack of global behaviours and debugging tools.
There was also a lot of smaller issues that put me off using it any further like the lack of community and the 3.0 version being nowhere in sight.
1. No global behaviours
In Stencyl there are things called behaviours and these allow actions to be executed, they are applied to either scenes or actors. Unfortunately they can't be applied globally which means that behaviours controlling the GUI and menus need to be applied to each and every scene manually, this becomes unmanageable when dealing with a lot of scenes like an RPG or room based game.
The workaround to this is making only a few large maps but that would mean coming up with a completely new camera system and then working out how handle all the spawning of enemies and items based on the room you enter. It'd be just as messy if not messier than making sure every scene has the right behaviours applied to them.
2. Barely any debugging tools
The only way to test for errors and performance is to read the console while trying to play the game and hope that the game triggers an error message while things are happening. all too often it won't or the message it displays isn't nearly verbose enough.
This tied into a critical bug involving the player being duplicated when scenes were switched that I had no idea how to fix for a long time, it also seemed to happen both randomly and in certain instances which made it harder to test if it was really fixed.
3. No outright buying
You can't buy a perpetual license for Stencyl, you only have the choice of several different subscription prices.
The base price is $79 a year, this allows you to publish to Web and desktop without a watermark and also test on mobile devices. The next one up is mobile at $149/year, this doesn't allow you to publish to desktop, only mobile devices and the web. Finally at $200/year you get the full package, there really isn't any extra features for buying the license apart from getting access to the 3.0 version and a special forum.
4. No updates in over a year
Currently Stencyl sits at version 2.2 which was released in June 2012, soon after that a 3.0 version was announced and then nothing happened to the current version.
The 3.0 version was planned for a release date of Q4 2012, that date has passed and I couldn't find any reasons for that happening.
There's some new features in Stencyl 3.0 like Haxe as the main language, an alternative to the current physics system, natively coded apps so you can get hardware acceleration and a whole bunch of mobile improvements. They weren't so important that I needed them immediately but not having access to them made the current version feel out of date and rather neglected.
5. Lack of community and good guides
A lot of the forum posts are left unanswered or unresolved so I had some trouble working out how to either build certain features or solve some bugs and creating forum posts that may not receive answers would be a waste of my time.
The guide section is also a mess, some of them are written around an older version or rely on you having read all of the guides in a certain series to make sense of what they are talking about.
There was also some challenges in the guides but they never provided answers or enough information to actually solve them.
6. UI problems and other bugs
I had a lot of problems adapting to how the UI worked in Stencyl, text boxes wouldn't update what they were connected to if you just tabbed through them, there was no right click menu for a lot places and information wouldn't update correctly across the different objects and tabs. I wasted way too much time opening and closing different tabs, pressing enter on text fields and restarting the program when small updates wouldn't work for unknown reasons.
There was also a major problem where builds of the game wouldn't work properly, either the controls had somehow disabled themselves, the character didn't get created, or the health bar disappeared for no reason. I kept on wondering if I had made a major change accidentally and almost all of the time a simple restart of the program would fix it.
Conclusion
I had some fun with Stencyl and I wish Construct 2 had a similar scene designer to it but the amount of problems I had means that it'll probably be a while before I revisit it. I guess it's much better suited to making platformers or single screen games than something that relies on a lot of items like an RPG or even an action adventure game.
There was some big issues like the lack of global behaviours and debugging tools.
There was also a lot of smaller issues that put me off using it any further like the lack of community and the 3.0 version being nowhere in sight.
1. No global behaviours
In Stencyl there are things called behaviours and these allow actions to be executed, they are applied to either scenes or actors. Unfortunately they can't be applied globally which means that behaviours controlling the GUI and menus need to be applied to each and every scene manually, this becomes unmanageable when dealing with a lot of scenes like an RPG or room based game.
The workaround to this is making only a few large maps but that would mean coming up with a completely new camera system and then working out how handle all the spawning of enemies and items based on the room you enter. It'd be just as messy if not messier than making sure every scene has the right behaviours applied to them.
2. Barely any debugging tools
The only way to test for errors and performance is to read the console while trying to play the game and hope that the game triggers an error message while things are happening. all too often it won't or the message it displays isn't nearly verbose enough.
This tied into a critical bug involving the player being duplicated when scenes were switched that I had no idea how to fix for a long time, it also seemed to happen both randomly and in certain instances which made it harder to test if it was really fixed.
3. No outright buying
You can't buy a perpetual license for Stencyl, you only have the choice of several different subscription prices.
The base price is $79 a year, this allows you to publish to Web and desktop without a watermark and also test on mobile devices. The next one up is mobile at $149/year, this doesn't allow you to publish to desktop, only mobile devices and the web. Finally at $200/year you get the full package, there really isn't any extra features for buying the license apart from getting access to the 3.0 version and a special forum.
4. No updates in over a year
Currently Stencyl sits at version 2.2 which was released in June 2012, soon after that a 3.0 version was announced and then nothing happened to the current version.
The 3.0 version was planned for a release date of Q4 2012, that date has passed and I couldn't find any reasons for that happening.
There's some new features in Stencyl 3.0 like Haxe as the main language, an alternative to the current physics system, natively coded apps so you can get hardware acceleration and a whole bunch of mobile improvements. They weren't so important that I needed them immediately but not having access to them made the current version feel out of date and rather neglected.
5. Lack of community and good guides
A lot of the forum posts are left unanswered or unresolved so I had some trouble working out how to either build certain features or solve some bugs and creating forum posts that may not receive answers would be a waste of my time.
The guide section is also a mess, some of them are written around an older version or rely on you having read all of the guides in a certain series to make sense of what they are talking about.
There was also some challenges in the guides but they never provided answers or enough information to actually solve them.
6. UI problems and other bugs
I had a lot of problems adapting to how the UI worked in Stencyl, text boxes wouldn't update what they were connected to if you just tabbed through them, there was no right click menu for a lot places and information wouldn't update correctly across the different objects and tabs. I wasted way too much time opening and closing different tabs, pressing enter on text fields and restarting the program when small updates wouldn't work for unknown reasons.
There was also a major problem where builds of the game wouldn't work properly, either the controls had somehow disabled themselves, the character didn't get created, or the health bar disappeared for no reason. I kept on wondering if I had made a major change accidentally and almost all of the time a simple restart of the program would fix it.
Conclusion
I had some fun with Stencyl and I wish Construct 2 had a similar scene designer to it but the amount of problems I had means that it'll probably be a while before I revisit it. I guess it's much better suited to making platformers or single screen games than something that relies on a lot of items like an RPG or even an action adventure game.
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