A Year Later...

[Scott Rossi]

How things have changed over the last year.

LiveCode has fully embraced mobile, and many (most?) LiveCode developers
are now pursuing at least some type of mobile development. So really,
there is little need for a separate mobile discussion group.

But just to stir the pot and keep things interesting, I thought I'd
mention something of interest I came across today: a game development
platform for desktop and mobile called Stencyl (www.stencyl.com).

Like other game development platforms such as GameSalad, Stencyl offers
drag-and-drop game development where logic and behaviors are represented
as visual blocks. The tool has a number of interesting aspects to it.

Apparently, Stencyl may have started out as a Flash game development tool,
and still has roots there, so the underlying assets used in the
environment appear to be vector based. I've tried some simple tests and
the asset generation tool (called Pencyl) looks a lot like the Flash IDE
and accepts pasted objects from Flash. This could be a real boon compared
to creating game assets with bitmap images only.

Also of interest is the ability to supplement the drag-and-drop
programming with coding. Stencyl uses the Haxe language (www.haxe.org),
which is an open source ActionScript/JavaScript type language that
compiles into other languages like JavaScript, C++, Java and C#. The
structure seems quite versatile for allowing multiple approaches to
programming and for being run on a variety of platforms.

The development blog mentions that the (upcoming) v3 supports the ability
to test on your iOS device without the need for xCode, and the ability to
run an iOS app from a Windows machine without using remote builds.

Currently Stencyl has no Android option, but the developers claim this is
coming soon, as well as support for HTML5.

At any rate, thought some of you might be interested. To folks in the US,
have a have a great Thanksgiving holiday next week.

Best Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, UX Design

[Peter W A Wood]

Thanks for the update Scott. Have a great Thanksgiving yourself.

Peter