They say everyone has a novel in them, and as long as you speak a language and know how to write, there's nothing stopping you making a go of it. But what if you've got a brilliant game idea in your head, but no coding knowledge to speak of?

StencylWorks, a free program for Mac and PC just two months out of beta, promises to simplify the process of game design to the extent that you can make a Flash game without any knowledge of how to write code.

What's more, a paid version of the software that will export to iOS formats for iPhone and iPad game development is currently in beta.


For StencylWorks creator Jonathan Chung, it's all about democratising the game development process. While indulging his hobby of remaking the likes of Mario, Kirby and Metroid, Chung quickly realised that a lot of the codebases were reusable, and constructed a simple tool to reuse specific elements. From there, it developed from a niche editor for platformers into a multi-purpose tool set allowing the creation of games of various genres, and it took the leap from hobby to fully fledged startup.

It was 2007 when the project began to take shape: "With the user-generated content movement on the rise, the idea of building a

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'YouTube for games' and democratising the whole process of game creation caught on with me and a few others," Chung says. It was another "YouTube of Games" -- Kongregate -- that Stencyl partnered with this year, and with the latter's thriving community of budding developers and gaming connoisseurs, it seems like a natural fit.

Is there a risk of lowering the overall quality of games by lowering the bar of entry? For Chung, there's some truth to that, but "it also opens the door for motivated people who otherwise wouldn't be able to make the leap to create some rather great things." He also believes the software can perform a wider service to the community by increasing the basic abilities of greenhorn developers: "To use a weightlifting analogy, making games development easy is lessening the weight on the bar, which lets more people lift it, but doesn't make the individuals any stronger.


A better approach would be to make everybody stronger to begin with, right? "At the heart of the matter, our goal isn't just to make game creation easier. To me, if that's the only goal, there's only so far you can go before reaching the point of diminishing returns."

But can any software really promise great results when simplified enough to allow Flash game design without Flash?

For Charlie Maragna (Drag Race Demon, Plink), who has built Flash games for the last five years, the greatest strength of the software is that it will encourage young developers to finish their early games. "Starting a game is easy -- actually getting it finished and out there is the hard part," he says.

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He sees the most likely users as being school age coders and artists who have never put fingers to coding keyboard. As for those who know their way around Adobe Flash, Flash Kit or Flash Develop, Maragna believes it to be of limited use: "It's slightly quicker than ActionScript 3, but you lose the fine control, and if you've made a number of games already, you likely have a body of code to cover most game design eventualities."


Cathy McBurney is more upbeat about the software. Having never worked with ActionScript, she has just completed her second title using StencylWorks -- Contract, a card game -- with art from renowned Flash artist Rob James (Cyclomaniacs, Match Day of the Dead). "It's a great visual way to create a game and see results quickly," says McBurney.

But despite the relative ease, she believes you still need a certain amount of technical know how: "If someone expects to jump straight into a game, having done no programming before, they may be quickly disheartened." With a helpful community, however, she insists most problems can be quickly overcome by the determined: "The makers themselves and the users always respond quickly to forum queries."

James agrees that it's a great tool for hobby designers, but like Maragna is unconvinced by its usefulness to those who already know their way around Flash. He also questions the output so far, only singling out one StencylWorks game -- Balls in Space -- as "really polished", and that's by someone he knows to be a professional Flash developer. "It goes to show that if you know what you're doing, you can get good results, but then again that kind of misses the point," he concludes.

Still, with iOS support just around the corner (a fee has yet to be decided for iStencyl, but should be around the $100-per-year mark for indie developers), and a marketplace -- StencylForge -- for users to share assets, the company certainly has a great deal of potential. With the help of Kongregate's instant distribution and sizeable community of critics to provide prompt (if not always constructive) feedback, StencylWorks should come closer to fulfilling Jonathan Chung's aims of improving budding game developers' strength than past, more insular, game creation software such as Klik & Play.

In a strange way, it's already worked for him: before creating founding Stencyl, he had no experience with Flash or mobile gaming.

Time will tell as to whether it helps less proactive people unleash their untapped game design talents.


Alan Martin (@alan_p_martin) is a freelance games writer, and Deputy Editor of flash games website Mousebreaker.com.

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How it's done: Popular StencylWorks games on Kongregate: Balls in Space // Robichai // Dungeon Rush // Crushing Cannon