Stencyl vs UPBGE

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.

UPBGE is a free, open-source 3D game engine derived from the old Blender Game Engine and integrated with Blender. It supports real-time games, architectural presentations, robotics prototypes, physics simulations, and other interactive applications. Modeling and game functions remain in one Blender workflow, without importing or exporting assets between them. Projects can run in Blender’s viewport or as standalone executables. Logic Nodes provide visual programming with more than 300 nodes, alongside custom scripts and Logic Bricks. Python extends functionality, while GLSL supports custom shaders and post-processing. Rendering uses Blender’s EEVEE, with listed support for PBR shading, reflections, ambient occlusion, bloom, shadows, light probes, and volumetrics. Bullet supplies physics; Audaspace and OpenAL handle audio; Detour and Recast provide navigation. Runtime binaries export to Linux, macOS, and Windows. Compatibility is incomplete: Curves and Speakers are not rendered in-game. BGE games load and execute only partially, and UPBGE games may not run correctly in BGE. The project includes tutorials, examples, older releases, alpha builds, and a Discord community.