The Flash player is insecure and prone to targeting by hackers.Īpple has a policy about mobile development to protect users from viruses and malicious software. On desktop the Flash player is very insecure and is patched constantly for security holes. There were many factors that 'killed' SWF on mobile. It isn't the application that was 'bad' it was the SWF format and 'player' that was a problem. SWF is the content that Apple wouldn't support.įlash can be used to develop for iOS, Android for mobile or SWF for desktop only.Īdobe has an entire suite of tools now for creating content in Flash and 'exporting' to different mobile platforms.įlash is a brilliant development tool for content. Learning how to work with the stage and the event system takes some getting used to, but once you’ve figured them out, you may find it much more satisfying to exercise greater control over your code than you could with Stencyl.Let's make sure we got the terminology correct.įlash is the development tool. If your foundation in object-oriented programming concepts is already strong, you may as well go straight to learning AS3.

Those people are quick to upload their bad games on sites such as Kongregate or Newgrounds, much to the detriment of Stencyl’s reputation. That’s not true of course, but Stencyl makes it so easy to make games that it enables people with no game development experience to make bad games fast. Finally, some players seem to think that anything made with Stencyl is bad. SWFs that are compiled from Stencyl may not be optimized and may run slower than an equivalent SWF compiled in Flex. In Stencyl, you can only use raster images, not vector art, and those will always be converted to PNGs even if you try to use a JPEG file. While Stencyl helps people learn general programming, it does not really help in learning object-oriented programming, which is what AS3 is built on. If you’re running Stencyl on a small screen, your code blocks may go beyond the horizontal limits of your screen. Often, the code blocks do not snap together or pull apart the way you intended them to. There are some disadvantages with using Stencyl, however. Also, Stencyl already comes with built-in Box2D commands, so you can easily make a Physics-based game without having to learn how to use a Physics engine like Box2D. Even if you already know AS3, Stencyl may be just what you need to make a quick prototype.

Another advantage of Stencyl is that it can help you make a complete game in a very short time. The code blocks in Stencyl are designed in such a way as to minimize the possibility of syntax errors. If you’re not familiar with how to do general programming such as making “if” statements or “for” loops, Stencyl would be a good tool to introduce you to these concepts.

Is stencyl good