Stencyl before GameMaker 8?

Back in January this year Stencyl, the currently under-development open-source game development engine, founded a Limited Liability Company to manage their project.

Speaking of the reasons behind the move Stencyl’s webmaster and Lead Web Programmer Stephen said…

“We appear more professional and committed just because we have the “LLC” after our name. It’s a minor thing, but it allows users, investors, and other such people, at first glance, to see that we are quite serious about the project.

“It centralizes the finances, risk, and legal liability for the websites. When we transfer over all of Stencyl’s assets (servers, mainly) to Stencyl bank accounts, it saves one of us from being the “official” host for the project and being personally liable for all the costs and liability that comes from our site. It also allows much more transparent and equitable distribution of our funds.”

Founder of the Stencyl project Jon also revealed that work on Stencyl only started at in January 2008, despite information regarding the project being online for a much longer period of time.

“Despite our seemingly late start and our busy schedules, we’ve made terrific progress in these months and are well positioned to start our beta program in the latter half of this year…..

“…We will only announce a release date when we are ready to release. We are (obviously) planning to release this year.”

If all goes to schedule this would mean that we would see the first version of Stencyl before Game Maker 8 which Sandy has said will not be seen until 2009.

If you are interested in the Stencyl project be sure to visit my Stencyl blog where you can watch video trailers of Stencyl and can read my opinions on the software, including a comparison with GameMaker.