I feel like talking a bit about the Game Dev. community right now, namely the software that allows people to make their own games without having to learn languages like C++ and the like. There is one program that has been grabbing my attention for a long time, but definitely not in a positive way. It's not hard to understand why, and my reasoning may be as common as everyone else who is sensible in software development. The date of release.

Stencyl's a "work in progress" game development program written in Java that simplifies game development and allows novices to quickly create their own games without any prior knowledge of programming.

That sounds excellent at first, and you might even say it is "promising" just hearing the same cliché phrase all over again. Oh wait, no, every piece of game development software makes this claim, and they end up looking more like their competitors. However, Stencyl has been at work for how long now? I do not know when Stencyl was necessarily "started", although going back to when Stephen joined the development team, it was at least around November, two-thousand and six that the project was first announced. It has been at least one-thousand one-hundred and three days, which means it will have been at least 90 days for it to have been a full, whole blown three years since Stencyl was announced to the general public and development was being done on Jon's little script. Yes, I am counting the non-proper Stencyl here; I don't care if you don't like me comparing something that is still rightfully a part of Stencyl now, "conceptually", according to Stephen himself.

Now, if I were to ask anyone how Stencyl's progress was going, what would the obvious answer be? Nothing. Zilch. Wala. Nada. Stencyl was at one point being promoted as an open-source program, but that stopped a while ago. Have they wasted so much time that they honestly could not put up any sort of code repository showing the current code? Usually, Open-Source software has a repository showing the current code (however unfinished, showing that there is PROGRESS), but Stencyl had none of this when it was "open-source." We never got to see any program code.

Has their development team fallen behind schedule and decided to hide all of that? What's the reason? Who knows! All I'm going to say is that them no longer publishing their software as open-source guarantees that unless they tread carefully, they are more prone to bugs than if the program was open-source. Either way, I'm not writing to explain what are the pros and cons about open-source programs. That can be left for another entry, in any case.

When you're building software like this, and you find that your users are heavily hyped for it, you need to make sure that they aren't over-hyped, and you prove to your users you're doing what you say you're doing. Stencyl does the complete opposite: they develop, and they protract the aura of isolation. No news, no screen shots, no meaningful video demonstrations about the program. It's all just talk and no walk. It's disappointing seeing someone jump into the world of software development. They may be whatever they want for all I know, but that virtually means nothing if all the wait was really not worth it and they haven't done something to show me and everyone else that they spent at least 3 years hard at work perfecting their software to scale above others (Game Maker, Construct, Multimedia Fusion, RM* series).

To software developers, take this as a calling: Don't work on software without at least releasing some sort of visual proof that you aren't sitting down on your ass doing nothing but venting on about how great and revolutionary your software is going to be. You want to keep your viewers interested. It's like building a website; you say it is all under construction, and you have your visitors hyped up with these cool ideas. When it comes time for opening, what do you have? Nothing. Just a whole bunch of links leading to 404s and excuses about construction falling behind.

What's my stance on this 3 year period wait? Stencyl is nothing more than over-hyped, amounting more along the lines of vaporware garbage. Until I see proof that the software was being developed all of this time and it wasn't just a bullshit "yeah we're working on it" to give users a false sense of hope, then I all can deduct is that Stencyl is non-existent. The only purpose of the site and forum existing right now is just to monetize their high volume of traffic.

What's worse, they have retarded credit policies. To quote Stephen, a developer:

Stencyl's credit policy is simple.

Games uploaded only to Stencyl.com do not need to credit Stencyl. We encourage any kind of credit that you would like to add, but it is not required. Games uploaded to Stencyl.com but embedded into other sites fall into this category as well.

Standalone Games (i.e. games not played on Stencyl.com) need to credit Stencyl somehow.

This can be in a CREDITS file, in an in-game credit cutscene (before, during, or after the game), a document distributed in the game, or anything you can imagine that clearly credits Stencyl with part of the game-creation process. Essentially, we don't care how you credit us as long as you do. We encourage creative, but clear, credit.

Conversely, you are not permitted to use Stencyl's name to imply affiliation or support from the Stencyl Team or Stencyl, LLC. For instance, do not use the terms "sponsored by" or "supported by" when crediting Stencyl. If you have questions, do not hesitate to ask.

Is this some sort of joke? Standalone games require credit, but games hosted on the Stencyl website do not? What kind of program do they think they have? They haven't released anything in a 3 year period and they expect people to suddenly conform to their demands? Especially ones as ludicrous as this? Game Maker and Mark Overmars *NEVER* asked for credit; nor did C++, or any other language or game designing software that I know of. Their forum is active, and it has members, but nobody has bothered to mention how idiotic all of this is. To add insult to injury, Game Maker was "free" for a time too; Mark Overmars had the decency to admit that one day Game Maker would possibly cost money for certain features, however. Of course, I remember the GM pages from the 2001/2002 days; way more professional than this Stencyl trash. Even Mark Overmars knew how to release screen shots to promote his software. Stencyl has nothing.

Stencyl said that they would have a release, whatever version/branch prior to 2009. 2009 came, and this is all they had for their January Update:

Last year, we implicitly said at one point that we would release "Stencyl” in some shape or form before 2009. New Year's Day has passed, and it should be clear that we haven't met that date. This was probably expected, but nonetheless may be a disappointment for all of you who were expecting us to start our beta program today. We're providing this notice to break the silence.

For the record, Stencyl will remain in stealth mode until we are ready to begin our beta program. As has always been the case, we won't announce any release dates, screenshots or videos until we are ready.

No Problems with Development

There’s absolutely no problem with Stencyl’s development, and we aren’t a company hawking vaporware. The main reason we're taking our time can be summed up in one word: quality. No matter what we release, we want it to meet our standards, and for beta, we have a checklist of items that must be all fulfilled for us to begin that program.

StencylWorks and the Stencyl platform already exist today. Over 20 testers who play around with our Alpha and have collectively found and closed over 500 bugs. The product is real, but it is still unfinished (relative to our goals for beta). As we've already said, we won't release unfinished work.

If you'd like to know exactly what we have left to do before beta, we invite you to have a look on Jon's blog.

Releasing Early Doesn't Always Work

We've already seen other competitive platforms (real companies, not hobby projects) release in 2008, but they have failed to gain traction for several reasons, among which quality is one. We're not going to fall into the same trap and will focus on quality to stand out from the crowd.

Conclusion

All in all, our beta will arrive soon enough, and we appreciate the support and warm wishes we’ve received thus far. Stick with us in 2009 – our new year’s resolution is to open our doors fully, so that everybody can start finding the fun.

Questions

We invite any questions from the public about our current status. We cannot guarantee responses to all of them, but we'll do our best to answer them as long as they are not about release dates or meaningless metrics like how much percent of Stencyl is complete for beta.

Please read Jon's blog before asking a question since it may already have answers to your questions

Is there a release here? No, there isn't. They're attempting to justify that with excuses with the generally flawed idea that the more time you dedicate to something, the better it is, and the more up to par and perfect it is. There is no feature list either! The blog system doesn't even work; it's a DNS error. The developer, as of July 28, 2009, Stephen is away "developing Stencyl." His return date? It is unknown, just like the release date. How convenient! Stealth mode? More like 'Vaporware Mode.' Stephen denies it, but until I he gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, his "500 bugs and lots of testers" logic is made-up. It's believable when I see it. We know that will not happen in a very long time, or probably ever.

This is all just a cheap marketing technique. I can just as easily register a domain, create a half-assed design, add some "[x] is a new game program that aims to change how games are developed", plug the link on some remote game development forum hyping the program as superior. See how the word gets leaked to every other realm on the Internet. If you want to give your users an even bigger incentive to believe you, just make a fake screenshot on GIMP/Adobe Photoshop, granted you also have a window template to perfectly simulate what is something that is not there. Whether Stencyl is released now or never, I don't care. All I know is that right now, it's very hard to believe there is any Stencyl at all (also, their site design is ugly and unprofessional. Why does everyone always have to use these stupid silk images when it comes to advertising their pile of horse jello products?), or if there ever will be one.

If it's released, great-just don't say that I didn't guarantee it was over-hyped when you find that [x] feature was missing. Speaking of features missing, Stencyl will not have online. They want to soar above the competition, but they aren't competent to add this to the official release. It confirms everything and speaks volumes of the "quality" of their product. At least Game Maker has the crappy mplay_* functions, and a standard, albeit not built-in DLL for building online games. Stencyl does not have any methods, as far as I'm concerned, that allow extending of the program's features like GML Extensions/DLLs. If you also want to know what this means in regard to building MMOs, it doesn't only mean the main engine is most likely crippled, but it also means they are impossible as of yet. It is completely possible to build an MMO in Game Maker, again, granted the right amount of work is done.

Stencyl does not have any true support for audio either. MP3, despite being a terrible file format, is a standard. Game Maker has MP3 support built-in, so if they want to bring in that "proprietary extension with copyright issues" excuse, they should consider everything else. If you thought that was surprising, then you haven't heard about their lack of support for playing movies. They state that you can just manually create the effects, but why do that? Game Maker has support for this built-in, why can't Stencyl have it too? Oh, right. Their excuse is that Java has poor movie playback support, and that in 2009, it well improve. We're approaching the end of the year with only a few months left, and I have yet to hear about any update. That post was made in February 25th, 2008.

Also, for what it is worth, does anyone remember the "Stencyl Demo" video that was released a long time ago showing how Stencyl worked? Well, too bad; that's "obsolete" and outdated according to everybody else on the forum. What struck me as most interesting was when a poster stated that "they were made before Stencyl was created." Apparently, this was an application that Jon, the founder, made before Stencyl was officially founded in 2008. Which again, could promote the idea of this being an more well-crafted scam than this is worth. Of course, everyone is welcome to believe what they want, but it's hard to believe anything is still being done.

Let's move on to a critical point though, that isn't entirely Stencyl design related: They say they never support fan games, but that is a very well crafted lie. It's all it really is, and it is as likely as that. They're completely wrong on the notion that fan games are illegal. Take a moment to consider these: fan fictions, fan art, parodies, or you know...anything else? Fan games do not differ much at all, because the concept is the same for each of the mentioned creations: they are not illegal. Their gimmick, if we go back to when they announced the program, was to publish kits to create fan games from already existing examples. Mega Man X and Mario 'programming kits' ring a bell? They should. They were building these and were going to port them somewhere with Stencyl and allow people to base their games off of these engines. Early mistake? No; this is Grade A hypocrisy at its finest. They changed the images on their website to reflect that, and because someone will just probably come in asking for proof, I'll break it down: Archive.org bots cannot index the site. What for? I don't know; more and more this just becomes even more suspicious.

This scam is just a reinvention of the wheel with an inefficient language, and a downgraded implementation to cope. If it even exists, then it is more sub par than they're giving their own program credit for.

That is all.