Stencyl vs Stride

Stencyl is game creation software for making mobile, web, and desktop games with visual logic or custom code. Its drag-and-drop designer uses snapping blocks and includes hundreds of ready-to-use blocks. Creators can also make and share blocks, import libraries, extend the engine with code, and write Haxe classes that work with block-based Behaviors. The Scene Designer provides selection, zooming, grid-snapping, and flood fill; the Actor Editor adjusts appearance, behaviors, and physical properties. Stencyl targets iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and HTML5. The free Starter edition publishes HTML5 games and lets users test games on paid target platforms, but cannot publish desktop, iOS, or Android games and displays Stencyl branding. Indie costs $99 a year and adds web and desktop publishing without watermarks. Studio costs $199 a year and includes publishing to iOS and Android, ads, leaderboards, in-app purchases, and third-party plugins. Publishing iOS games to the App Store requires an active Apple developer license and a Mac. Stencyl says it collects no royalties on games.

Stride is a free, open-source C# engine for building 2D and 3D games and interactive content on desktop and VR. Game Studio manages assets, scenes, sprites, interfaces and curves. The engine provides physics, navigation meshes, visual scripting, physically based materials, light probes, particles, post effects and customizable shaders, with DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs. C# 14, .NET 10, asynchronous scripting and hot reload are supported. Native Oculus and HTC Vive support includes VR previewing from the scene editor. Stride exports to Windows, Linux, Android and iOS, and is free to use, modify and distribute under the MIT license. Listed development requirements include Windows 10 or 11, an x64 CPU, a Direct3D 10-or-newer GPU, 4 GB RAM and 5 GB disk space. The project describes itself as community-driven, without full-time developers dedicated solely to its advancement.