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So about a week ago I discovered a blog about how easy it is to make video games now. I had already known about UDK (Unreal Development kit), and have played around with it. But the amount of time (and computer graphics and memory!) required to get anything useable up and running in UDK makes it hard to use. On top of that, I feel like I'd have to create all the textures from scratch for everything and I was finding that more daunting (not that I *couldn't* do it.... It just never turned out how I wanted it too and.... well... life).

So, back to this post I found. It had some great tips to jump starting a video game career with no experience in coding. This caught my interest. Then they talked about all these easy to learn free programs.Twine an easy non-linear story creator. That looked cool. I am also a writer so the idea of writing adventure stories where the reader is interacting with the story sounds awesome. There is some minor coding you could do, and animations maybe? So it would look like an interactive story book or simple video game.

But the one that really caught my interest is Stencyl. This one is a simple program that creates code for you, and allows you to design a video game (it uses C++ but you don't need to know any code!) The way you "write" the code is to use blocks that snap into place like legos. It looks so easy and fun!

Its been about a week now and I think I'm changing my mind on how "easy" it is. Its not the program, its the tutorials and helps. It appears this program is actually fairly new (its still in beta mode!). The program itself works great, but the helps to figure it out, they are still in the process of writing them. So, the block encyclopedia doesn't have a search option yet, the tutorial guide doesn't explain key features all the time, and the best way to learn is to search youtube. So....

I decided I'd start this block to post some codes. As I learn and find things that work, I'll post them here for easy reference for anyone else! I'm not saying I'll always post everything, lol I like to have tricks up my sleeve too ;) But I'll share what I can.

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