Hey game maker peoples, is Stencyl currently the best free / cross platform way to teach games in a classroom?
I'm going to be doing an afterschool make your own games project with teenagers / young adults and I'm a little rusty on the best tools for 2017
@candle yeah, scratch is cool and stencyl implements the same kind of plug-block coding interface, but it has a lot better understanding of game needs like tilesets and hitboxes from what I can see
@mickmaus ohhh i didn't know stencyl had the coding blocks, nice
@mickmaus it depends on the type of game you want to make what tools you use.
Also what aspect of game making do you want to teach them?
It might be better to teach basic concepts than how to use a specific tool.
@cy it's less a class to teach "game design" and more a fun creative activity for the students. That is, there will be little to no lecture component so there's not much to teach theory with, outside of learning it in a particular software
@mickmaus yeah i think so. there's scratch but that's more for younger kids and is less focused on games specifically.
there's stuff like twine and puzzlescript too but that may not be what you're looking for.
there's also pico-8/one of its free clones (https://tic.computer/, https://github.com/RamiLego4Game/LIKO-12), which might be appealing.
@mickmaus I love Godot (https://godotengine.org).
It's a powerful cross-platform open-source (C++) and well-documented game engine. It works for both 2D and 3D games, the script language is heavily influenced by python, with C# coming soon, and it's statically linked, so it's a breeze to deploy: no dependencies. And the community is very active.
@lertsenem looks good! think it might be a bit advanced for the level of experience (none) i'm going to be working with :)
@mickmaus i know scratch is supposed to be pretty good, but i guess you already considered that and it's too basic?