Hello to anyone who is actually seeing this.
Please understand this question comes from my heart. I am in no way meaning to offend anyone. I am just heartbroken about my experience with Stencyl and I am not sure what to do about it.
I have been trying to create a game using Stencyl, but I find every time I do anything in Stencyl, nothing works correctly and all material for learning is all out dated with broken links, broken flash videos, or forum posts that are years old! What is with Stencyl? Even the most simple logic is not working in this thing.
1) I started out wanting to make a merging chemist game. But each time I tried to get objects to merge in game, it wouldn't work. I did eventually get the logic to work but then because of how Stencyl works, the logic would actually fail randomly. So I figured, ok a bug, and decided I just wouldn't make that type of game with Stencyl.
2)Next I attempted to make a top down RPG type game. The only thing I needed to do was get items to draw in the proper z ordering so they didn't overlap incorrectly while playing the game. This is something you see in many games these days, so I was confident Stencyl would have a logic for it. I tried several different block arrangements. There was NOTHING to read in the documentation about it except some methods for using the z ordering blocks that didn't work upon running the game. All posts in the forums lead to dead ends. To be fair, most of them were from 2014. So, I decided to make my own thread. Only a few people replied. One seemed willing to help, but was too busy with his own life to actually explain what and how to impliment his "work around". He eventually resorted to giving me over to an other's website to purchase someone else's completed programming. I appreciated the effort, but my goal was to learn how to use Stencyl, not have someone else do the work for me.
3) So, being I was finding no way to learn how to make proper game z ordering work with blocks, I gave up on that and decided to start over and just do a scrolling game. No merging, no need for any z ordering, just scrolling and characters interacting with other Actors. It wasn't the game I set out to make, but I still thought it would be fun. I was able to get a simple setup with land to walk on and a character to walk back and forth on it. I placed some items on the board as well. Then I went to the task of making a behavior that allows items to grow slightly when hovered over with the mouse. This is another super simple game logic that should have been quick and easy. I first used the On Actor Event and created an "enters Actor" logic. I put a "grow actor" block in there and added the behavior to the desired actors. I saved and found when I ran the game, it did absolutely nothing. Simple logic, "Enter Actor>Grow Self". There is no way to mess this up. I went to the learning center. The Code Block documentation gave me nothing I could use. The "Stencyl TV" thing was broken. I even found an interactive Stencyl Book? Yeah, broken link. I went back to the forums and found an old post from 2014 again. (that was an active year for the forums it seems.) It stated I needed to put my code blocks in the Updating event. So I did, with an if statement that used an "mouse is over self" block. But you know what, it doesn't work. It does absolutely nothing. I'm not surprised. Because this tends to be my experience with Stencyl. Perfectly sound logic fails at runtime and no help is found in forums or any of the resources available because they all say that what I did should be working. My guess is, the program may be now riddled with bugs and nobody is fixing them. Or maybe there isn't enough people available to fix them. All I know is, this should have worked. There was no reason it shouldn't. I should have been able to use Code blocks to simply recreate such a simple logic as EnterMouse>GrowActor. That simple actions like this are not working leads me to conclude Stencyl is not as high quality as I had hoped.
Now I am asking myself, Why are all the video's broken? Shouldn't they have been updated past Flash by now if someone was actually serious about Stencyl continuing on? Why are all the learning resources so vague? Why must I always search the forums for answers that aren't there? Why are the only people offering me support sending me to their website to buy their products?
I truly wanted to create a game that I could be proud of and go through the whole process of publishing and doing my part by paying Stencyl to host my game or whatever else was required to get my game out there, but this has gotten to the point I don't even believe Stencyl is even a "REAL" thing anymore. Stencyl was hailed to me as a platform that was aimed at making game creation easy and fun. It has been everything BUT these things.
My hope is you will not delete this post and realize that everything I have said here has been because I have genuinely been quite frustrated with Stencyl having not given me the experience I thought was available to me based on what was advertised. I am truly reaching out to find out why I can't find support. Is there any reason for me to believe, I, as someone with minimal programing background, can actually MAKE a game like all the Stencyl Advertisements tell me I can? Because up to this point. I am unconvinced.
