Stencyl Essentials: 2nd Stencyl Book Out Now!

Richard Sneyd

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  • Posts: 188
I'm very excited to announce to the Stencyl community that I have completed work on Stencyl Essentials, and that is has been published by Packt Publishing and is now available in digital and paperback formats from Amazon, Google Play etc. along with the Packt website itself.
 
It has not been written as a replacement for Learning Stencyl 3.x Game Development: Beginner's Guide, by Innes Borkwood, which is an excellent reference material for Stencyl game development, written by a very competent Stencyl user. Rather, the purpose of the book is to provide a fast paced text, targeting those with basic computer skills and/or some computer science/computer programming experience. It cuts out a lot of the ancillary content which would usually have to be covered in a beginners guide, speeding up the learning experience for Stencyl-centric topics. It has also been designed to function as a handy reference work for teachers working with Stencyl in the classroom.

Hence, Stencyl essentials is best suited to people who are either:
  • new to Stencyl, but not completely new to programming, or
  • have been using stencyl for a short while, and perhaps even read the Beginners Guide, but want to learn some more sophisticated programming techniques (Stencyl Essentials will teach this)

Some of the key takeaways for the reader are:
  • Modifying the shipped behaviors to fit your own custom requirements
  • Writing your own behaviors from scratch, and working with the various event types
  • Writing custom events and utilizing them extensively to create smarter, and more readable code
  • Writing custom blocks, which accept parameters to perform various functions
  • Using attributes, and game attributes, in all kinds of clever and useful ways
  • Writing and utilizing complex conditional logic
  • Building detailed level  geometry using tilesets
  • Designing control systems that suit both Desktop and Mobile targets (PC, Mac, Linus, iOS and Android)

It was a great pleasure for me to write a book on the wonderful Stencyl game engine, and it is my sincerest hope that this work will aid many more students, hobbyists, educators and developers in learning (or, teaching) game development.

For more information about the book as well as purchasing options, please visit us at CMG Academy on the following page: http://cmgacademy.com/stencyl-essentials/

Richard Sneyd
CMG Academy

Photics

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Congratulations! It's hard to write a book! :)
Michael Garofalohttp://photics.com – Author of The Interactive Stencyl Textbook 8)

Donni11

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Nice ! Just took a look on Amazon's " look inside " it looks really cool :) !
Peace

Innes

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Hi Richard,

Congratulations on the publication of your book.

Having provided technical reviews for the first half of the book, there seemed to be a communication breakdown between me and the publisher, inasmuch as I heard nothing from them (no reflection on you)! The next thing I knew was that the book had been published!

I hope it goes well; there's a lot of hard work involved. I don't think anyone will know quite how much time and effort is involved unless they have written a book themselves!

I hope you and your family are well.

Best regards,
Innes
Visit www.TheStencylBook.com - the only published book for learning Stencyl.

Richard Sneyd

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  • Posts: 188
Hi guys, thanks for all the supportive and kind words! Yes, it is definitely a challenge to write a book to the point of publishing, harder than I had anticipated. I never realized how many stages and rewrites were involved before, that was the most time consuming part. Thanks for helping out with the technical reviewing process Innes, you're feedback and suggestions proved very helpful to me in the final draft stage, I hope to work with you again sometime.

Thanks again to all!

Bhoopalan

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I must admit that Richard is the one who made me look back at Stencyl. I'm sure your new book would be good.
If I helped you at anytime, help me back build my twitter followers :)
https://twitter.com/imbhoopalan


Donni11

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Hi Richard :) .  Are there any promo codes for this book ?
Peace


Donni11

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Peace

Richard Sneyd

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  • Posts: 188
@Donni11,

I spoke with the marketing team at Packt, who have informed me that they will provide a promo code by Monday. For now, though, you can use this link to fill out an online survey, after which you will receive an 80% discount which you can use on Stencyl Essentials!  :D

http://bit.ly/1LjRzWg

Donni11

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Thanks so much :) !!
Also I was wondering does the book teach on how to save and a shop ( using game money )?
Peace

Richard Sneyd

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  • Posts: 188
@Donni11: I'm afraid the book doesn't cover in-game currency (although the last chapter does cover the basics of monetization), simply because of the page limit I was working within. The team at Packt wanted to keep the purchase price relatively low for the reader with this title, and we were successful in doing that, but it meant minimizing the page count to cut down on overheads and printing costs-- I was supposed to keep it between 120 to 150 pages long, but it ended up being over 200. So there's a lot of material in there, more than there was supposed to be for the money, but it meant I couldn't cover extra topics like the one you just mentioned, though I would have liked to. Maybe in the next book though! I'm hoping to write another, longer one some time in the not too distant future 8)

Donni11

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Thanks for the reply :) ! Also so what topics does it cover that the Learning Stencyl guide etc does not ?
Peace

Richard Sneyd

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  • Posts: 188
I suppose the key difference is the style and the target audience. The Beginners Guide that Innes published is written in highly expository, detailed language -- as it should be -- because it is specifically targeting beginners, as the name indicates. On the other hand, when Packt approached me about writing Stencyl Essentials, they were clear from the outset that they wanted me to write it for people with some computer science or computer programming experience.

So in practice, what this means is that very little time is spend explaining basic computing or programming concepts. More advanced concepts are elucidated where this is needed, of course. Therefore, this is a very Stencyl-centric book; readers of the book will learn the functional use of Stencyl, VERY, VERY QUICKLY. I would be fairly comfortable in saying that it is probably the quickest way to get up and running with Stencyl, period.

Hence, Stencyl essentials is best suited to people who are either:
  • new to Stencyl, but not completely new to programming, or
  • have been using stencyl for a short while, and perhaps even read the Beginners Guide, but want to learn some more sophisticated programming techniques (Stencyl Essentials will teach this)


Some of the key takeaways for the reader are:
  • Modifying the shipped behaviors to suit your specific needs
  • Writing your own behaviors from scratch, and working with the various event types
  • Writing custom events and utilizing them extensively to create smarter, and more readable code
  • Writing custom blocks, which accept parameters to perform various functions
  • Using attributes, and game attributes, in all kinds of clever and useful ways
  • Writing and utilizing complex conditional logic
  • Building detailed level  geometry using tilesets
  • Designing control systems that suit both Desktop and Mobile targets (PC, Mac, Linus, iOS and Android)

Hope that makes things a bit clearer, thanks!