Stencyl

If you hear about games development, you would immediately think about an army of programmers and long lines of code, but things are much simpler when it comes to games for mobile devices or web browsers, especially when using a specialized program, such as Stencyl. The software offers a modern and comfortable environment, in which you may create and manage a game's resources and use them to create games for all popular platforms. The best part is that everything can be done without typing any code.

Stencyl is available in free and paid versions, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It takes several minutes to download and install the software, but you don't have to make any complex settings along the way. The hardware requirements are modest, so you won't notice any loss in performance, even on older machines.

A welcome center is the first thing you will find on the program's user interface. This is where you can open recently saved game projects, create new ones, create and manage installation kits, download new game components from the Internet and more. Actors, backgrounds, fonts, scenes and other elements are stored in separate folders. You can select these folders in a column, on the left side of the user interface and view their contents in the larger area on the right.

Creating new game elements or editing existing ones can be done on the same window, but on separate tabs. The software provides you with a huge number of controls, for each type of element. For example, when you create a new actor, you can animate it by importing and editing individual frames, edit its behavior, set up triggers and events, tweak its collision and physics settings and more. Customizing an actor's behavior or setting up events is quite easy. Instead of typing long lines of codes, you can just drag and drop various snippets. The best part is that you may combine them, to form "if-then" cases, by dropping one snippet over another, as if you were assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

Stencyl comes with many useful tools for compiling and testing your games and you can even download new ones from the Internet. What's more, the program is capable of exporting games for all popular platforms. This includes iOS and Android mobile devices, Flash, Windows, Mac and Linux.