A Stencyl alternative for a 3D world instead of a 2D scene

It took block-based programming seriously as a production tool rather than a teaching aid. Snap-together logic, actors with behaviours, scenes, and games that got published and played. For a lot of people it was the first tool where a game they made left their own machine.

Its behaviour model in particular was well designed. Attaching reusable behaviours to actors is a good way to think about a 2D game, and it scales further than a single script per object does.

If your project is 2D and Stencyl is working, there is no argument here. This page is for people whose next idea does not fit inside a 2D scene.

Usually dimension. A 2D tool can be pushed toward pseudo-3D but not into a landscape, and the moment your idea involves standing on a ridge and looking down at something, the tool is the wrong shape.

Sometimes it is the block ceiling instead. Blocks are excellent until the behaviour needs twenty of them and a variable whose purpose you have to remember. At that point the blocks have stopped simplifying and started being a slower way to write code.

The usual advice at that point is to learn a scripting language. Stage Engine exists for people who are not going to.

It splits the work differently. The world is built by hand: you shape terrain, outline water, set weather and the time of day, and place buildings and characters directly in a builder that behaves like a level editor.

The logic is not built at all. Director 1 writes GDScript into your project from what you describe. Twenty blocks of behaviour is a sentence, and what you do afterwards is play it and say what is wrong rather than trace which block fired.

The engine underneath is Godot, which is open source. Your project is a Godot project on your own disk and opens in stock Godot, so nothing is trapped in a format only one tool understands.

It is a desktop app for Mac and Windows. There is a download and an install, and there is no browser version.

Building needs an internet connection, because Director 1, asset generation and world data all come over the network. Playing what you built does not, because the game runs locally on the bundled Godot.

And you lose inspectability. A block stack is visible; generated code is only visible if you open it. It is there — GDScript in your project — but the workflow does not put it in front of you the way blocks are in front of you.

One place and one idea. A stretch of coast with a boat that does something strange, or a hillside with a thing that follows you. Small enough to finish in a week and specific enough that finishing it tells you something.

Resist the sequel-sized plan. The reason is not that the tool cannot do it — it will happily build whatever you ask for — but that a large project takes months to reach the point where you learn anything, and a small one takes days.

Once the small thing works, the second project can be three times the size and you will actually know how to steer it. That progression is the same in every tool and it is the part people skip.

Free to download with a free plan. Indie is $10 a month and Pro is $50, and they buy more usage rather than more engine.

The fit is: someone comfortable with the idea of building a game, no longer interested in assembling the logic themselves, and wanting a 3D world running natively on their own machine. If that is not you, a 2D block tool is still the better answer and it is worth saying so.