I have decided to try my hand at video game development, something I have wanted to do for a long time, but have not really got into.

I am actually a fairly good software developer, with a ton of experience under my belt, so at first I considered writing my own game engine, but decided to check what else is out there, before I started diving into that.

I then discovered stencyl, a visual development program that allows development of games that can be compiled into flash, for desktop, or for iOS (with HTML5 and Android planned for a future version).

I have spent the weekend playing around with it, and making a basic game with the kit is simple. It sells itself as something saying that no programming is needed. I am not entirely sure if this is true, since it uses a visual programming tool, where you can “snap” in various visual elements to create behaviours, which means that you have a programming language in effect, although one that requires less typing. It seems to have pretty much everything you need.

Having said that, it should be easily picked up by non-programmers, and for those that want to dive in, there is the ability to write the code in flash, which I have not tested out, since my knowledge of flash is very limited.

So, I am going to try to create something playable with Stencyl to see how it goes, I will let you all know when it is finished.