But you can’t play it and I can’t really talk about it :( You see, I’m now a beta tester for the ever mysterious Stencyl game creation tool, which has been under development for well over two years now. There are still plenty of people who don’t believe it really exists, but I’ve spent the last week fumbling around the interface, trying to learn it.

I’m still not sure exactly how much I can say about it. The developers are encouraging us to talk about it, help to get it known, but at the same time there are still large parts of the whole deal covered by the NDA. All I will say is that I’m really enjoying it so far, and that it seems to make the easy things a little bit harder, but the hard things so much easier.

So anyway, here’s a little screengrab of my game in progress:

It’s not much to look at right now, but the gameplay is all there. You control the blue thing, and you fly around eating the green things. If you eat them sooner you score more points. Every time you eat a green thing, a red thing is born. The red things pick a direction at random and start flying at a randomly determined speed. You lose the game if your blue thing hits one of the red things.

I don’t have a name for it yet, and I still need to add a few things, like sounds and eye candy. My plan is to have it ready in time for a mini competition running in the beta community forums.