Stencyl vs Angel2D

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine.

Visual scripting in Stencyl is based on the MIT Scratch project, which was designed to teach programming. Script elements fit together like puzzle pieces, ensuring that data and function types cannot be mismatched.

Publish iOS, Android, Flash, Windows and Mac games without code.

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl 3.x

Stencyl exports your games to native code so they have great performance on every platform.

The framework is focused on prototyping. It has plenty of features to speed up development. It has a console with a lua interpreter, tuning variables and function calls. GWEN is well supported. Provides a simple interface for Box2D. A simple messaging system with which entities can subscribe to to receive messsages among other things.

Angel2D is built with the idea that you the game developer should have control over the framework and be able to add features if you like. So the code is BSD-licenced and very easy to extend for anyone that has completed a basic C++ course or equivalent.

While Angel2D isn't the best performing framework out there it's certainly no slog when compared to competition. Simply by the virtue of being native it puts itself ahead of engines like Gamemaker and frameworks like Love2D.

If you're not comfortable with a basic subset of C++ it is not recommended to use this framework. But the Lua scripting platform is very nice for generating actors.

Often with game engines they throw you into unfamiliar territory and let you explore for yourself. While this wouldn't be a big issue with Angel2D due to it being a very simple framework it kickstarts your game prototyping.

Angel was created with game jams in mind, so it's focused on providing as many convenient features as possible, but in a quickly understandable way.

Angel can create games for Windows, the Mac, most flavors of Linux, and iOS. It uses the native build systems on each platform (Visual Studio, Xcode, Make), so you can be up and running as soon as possible.

Low-level code that Angel wraps is always just an easy click away, ready to be overridden or improved.

A very important point that's often underestimated. This framework is designed to be removed. It's not there to provide a complete engine for you which you will have trouble moving away from. The basic interface to Box2D is very spartan. You're given the simplest of Box2D shapes, not even polygonal fixtures. This limitation (seems to be) there so that the integration with the engine is very low. You never create a physics actor with anything more complicated than an enum describing if it's supposed to be a sphere shape or box shape.