Years ago, I used game maker fairly extensively (before it was "studio", if I'm not mistaken), and I struggled to eher complete any projects when I used it. Partly because of lack of experience, and partly because it seemed so daunting. About 4 years ago, after learning BASIC and trying realllyyy hard to learn 6502 Assembly, I gave up. About a year ago, I went back to game maker and saw how much it has changed in the last 10 years, and felt a little discouraged that I had fallen so far out of touch with something I always wanted to pursue but put on the back-burner. I started doing mad google-searches at night to whittle my options down to different development platforms that I felt seems easy enough to start learning how to think like a programmer again, and not just vomit command lines without knowing how to put it all together.
Stencyl became my ever-increasing path of viability after all of my research, and I'm glad I found it. The Internet, probably 30 different websites and forums, is how I found and ultimately decided to use and learn Stencyl as my jumping-off point. Now that I have some experience under my belt with it, though, I don't think it's just a starting point anymore. I see possibilities with this platform for years to come. And I really do feel thankful that the people working on this program decided to do it and keep updating it to make a real option for game development.
Thanks, google! And Stencyl!
