Man, around 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, I used to noodle around AGS. I think I made a couple of "games", but never released them or anything. Glad to see it's still around!
Among other things, this got me dabbling with software development. It had an awesome C++ like scripting language.
It also used to have a button with a text like "make a game" where you would click what you wanted in the form of checkboxes and when you pressed the submit button it would tell you something like, it's not that easy, is it? Wonder how easier it may be now. :P
Both creators are now very active on Youtube. Yahtzee has split from The Escapist to create an independent journalism website Second Wind, and Rebecca streams video games as Rebecca's Pixel Quest.
His friend and collaborator Francisco Gonzales (Grundislav) also has a great backlog of games. Besides recent commercial efforts, there's the free Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator series: https://www.grundislav.games/Ben-Jordan.html
Hah! Thanks for sharing. Great to see them doing fun stuff. Just watched a quick yatzhee one. I did play a few in the Ben Jordan series and duty and beyond.
Blast from the past. In my mind, the Adventure Game Studio is forever tied to the ancient (German) Maniac Mansion Mania website [0]. Yes, that Maniac Mansion from Lucasfilm Games.
To this day, they’re are releasing fun new adventure episodes in the Maniac Mansion universe.
Oh wow completely forgot about AGS, awesome that it’s still alive and kicking! Brings back memories of Gabriel Knight, Broken Sword, Monkey Island and many other awesome adventure series!
Anybody else fondly remember the earlier Adventure Construction Set from the 1980s? It was similar, though more crude, software but for creating tile based adventure games. I remember breathlessly waiting for it to arrive in the mail one summer when I was a young teen, and then my brother and I spending countless hours creating games for each other to play.
I was so excited bringing that box/album cover home from the store. I read the manual through just imagining the games I’d make. When I got home, I put the disk in, and… learned what “minimum system requirements” were, as it wouldn’t run on my PCjr.
Now I'm creating adventures in Cursor with MOOLLM and working on compiling them to JavaScript to run in the browser, kind of like The Sims meets LambdaMOO meets Cursor:
Here's an interview where MOOLLM explains itself, then we go on a wild ride with the Irn Bru snowman, with underground embassy intrigue, Columbo style:
What I got into before Adventure Construction Set was Stuart Smith's previous game "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves".
It let you play upto 17 players (locally). Each player would get their turn, in turn, and do their moves, then pass the controller. A slow character might get to move 3 tiles per turn. A fast character 7 tiles per turn. Each character could go in any direction they wanted, the group didn't have to stick together. I played it with 5 people.
Also played it single player. When I got to the end, it challenged you to make it to the end without a single fight. I made it to that end and it had a congrats screen from Stuart Smith.
I do... 20 minutes on an Apple II for it to create a random adventure, which I found fascinating. I actually have the original in my collection. The games weren't bad, kind of like a decent hobby indie game from today.
Also Graphical Adventure Creator for the Amstrad CPC. I loved it, but failed to produce even a single adventure. My perfectionist tendencies made sure any progress ground to a halt almost immediately over text, logic or graphics!
I think that Wadjet Eye Games studio still uses AGS for their games, and most (all?) of the games published by them seems to use AGS as well.
I highly recommend checking their catalogue. While the first installements of Blackwell series didn't age that well I still think they are a quite nice starting point – they are short and memorable.
Wow, I haven't heard about AGS for a while - glad to see it's still alive and well. It should be noted that it's open source and still sees regular updates (20+ years later!)
I remember looking at it about 20 (?) years ago and came back disappointed that I could not use it on my Mac.
Well, at least I was able to revive this feeling today... :-(
I have never tried AGS, but I cut my game making teeth on Klick and Play and RPG maker back in the day. I think I was intimidated by the amount of art and the level of story telling needed to craft an adventure game. I wish there was a mac version of this, since I refuse to go near windows at this point.
RPG Maker XP (and later VX) were such a big part of my childhood! I never finished the game I was trying to make, but it is earliest I can remember being very deep into the creative process.
I've created my own adventure game engine starting in the late 1990s. Only learned about the existence of AGS many years later. Although my own engine allows much more flexibility than AGS, there is no userfriendly IDE and besides the runtime, it's mostly just a bunch of separate tools. I have to applaud Chris Jones for going all the way, it's really quite impressive.
Unfortunately, Edward's project is just a runtime for running AGS games on Mac. The AGS Editor (the topic of the original post) is still Windows-only, and will likely always be due to its deep reliance upon Windows GUI libraries.
Hi! I've been following your work on GodotJS for a while now. Really cool stuff man, thanks for all the improvements you landed in GodotJS!
I think most of the people using Godot are not aware how powerful and ergonomic GodotJS actually is. All the intellisense and completion suggestions goodness when using GodotJS is a godsent.
Can you tell us a bit more about how making breaka club with GodotJS has been going for you?
- Are you using Godot as kind of a rendering frontend while your TypeScript code is rather self-contained and only interacts sparingly with the APIs exposed via GodotJS or is everything deeply intertwined? I'm curious because I'm still looking for a good GDScript replacement. I really dislike GDScript so much :(
- How has performance been? I'd imagine V8 with JIT be a lot faster than GDScript and probably within 2-3x of C#? But I guess one wouldn't be able to use V8 JIT on consoles or iOS? I wonder if the performance hit would be tolerable.
- Do you still have high-performance code you write with e.g. godot-cpp and if so, how's easy is it to make those things interact?
- I saw that there have been thoughts about migrating GodotJS to a GDExtension but it's not easy it seems? Would be a great long-term goal imo because not having to use a custom engine build and instead just plug in a GDExtension would be pretty convenient.
- I assume that one cannot use stuff like the node file system API or such things and one has to restrict themselves to JavaScript/TypeScript code that would also run in the browser?
Sorry for the flood of questions, no need to answer them all. Still curious about all of those things :)
Randomly stumbled upon this yesterday when I learned that there is a Goblins 5 (released 2023) and it was built using AGS and it’s playable using ScummVM!
From what I can tell taking to people in the discord and stuff, people seem to do it all the time and not run into any issues.
Still, it would be neat if they got off winforms and switched to something like Avalonia
Does anyone remember a similar commercial(?) application from maybe 10~20 years ago that was focussed specifically on point-and-click Myst-like adventure games? I think it didn't have scripting, at least not of the kind that AGS has. I can't remember what it was called.
Edit: Oh, it was Adventure Maker! And it had a free version: https://www.adventuremaker.com/ — Apparently stuff like scripting and sprites do exist, but only in the paid version. It's cool the website is still around.
The problem with these engines is you need to become familiar with both Godot as well as the point&click extension making them less suited as a first adventure authoring platform.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadIt also used to have a button with a text like "make a game" where you would click what you wanted in the form of checkboxes and when you pressed the submit button it would tell you something like, it's not that easy, is it? Wonder how easier it may be now. :P
Shoutout to classic community games like
- Cirque De Zale https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/377/
- The trilby series (5 days a stranger) https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/269-5-days-a...
Both creators are now very active on Youtube. Yahtzee has split from The Escapist to create an independent journalism website Second Wind, and Rebecca streams video games as Rebecca's Pixel Quest.
A few more favorites:
The recent Shards of God, a science fantasy murder mystery https://hvavra.itch.io/shards-of-god
Duty and Beyond - a sprawling rabbit-hole adventure with a minimalistic low-res art style https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/747/
Ben Chandler has made a lot of fun tiny games: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/search/&q=title-o...
He is now working on Gilt, inspired by the Dying Earth and Book of the New Sun: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3979770/Gilt/. He also blogs, and has a huge archive analyzing point and click adventure game room art. https://ben304.blogspot.com/
His friend and collaborator Francisco Gonzales (Grundislav) also has a great backlog of games. Besides recent commercial efforts, there's the free Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator series: https://www.grundislav.games/Ben-Jordan.html
To this day, they’re are releasing fun new adventure episodes in the Maniac Mansion universe.
[0] https://www.maniac-mansion-mania.com/index.php/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(video_game)
Good god, 280 Eamon Adventures, last released October 2023, I have a lot of catching up to do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eamon_adventures
Same dragon title screen illustration as Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventur...
Also great memories of Richard Garriott's Akalabeth: World of Doom!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom
An Adventure I wrote in Logo, released on the C64 Terrapin Logo examples floppy, using the Logo REPL as the parser:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
Now I'm creating adventures in Cursor with MOOLLM and working on compiling them to JavaScript to run in the browser, kind of like The Sims meets LambdaMOO meets Cursor:
Adventure MOOLLM Anthropic skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adventu...
Adventure Compiler design document:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...
Adventure-4 example microworld:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...
Here's a marathon session playing in Cursor, and making a wish on a monkey's paw for the rest of the monkey:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...
Here's an interview where MOOLLM explains itself, then we go on a wild ride with the Irn Bru snowman, with underground embassy intrigue, Columbo style:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...
It let you play upto 17 players (locally). Each player would get their turn, in turn, and do their moves, then pass the controller. A slow character might get to move 3 tiles per turn. A fast character 7 tiles per turn. Each character could go in any direction they wanted, the group didn't have to stick together. I played it with 5 people.
Also played it single player. When I got to the end, it challenged you to make it to the end without a single fight. I made it to that end and it had a congrats screen from Stuart Smith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Adventure_Writer
I highly recommend checking their catalogue. While the first installements of Blackwell series didn't age that well I still think they are a quite nice starting point – they are short and memorable.
https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=AGS/Games
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags
https://www.protovision.games/games/d42.php?language=en
> This port was initially done by Edward Rudd for providing Gemini Rue in a Humble Bundle when the AGS backend was Allegro 4. Currently, it uses SDL2.
[0] https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/tree/master/OSX
Currently supports RPG mechanics, with digital card game support coming soon. Plan is to keep expanding what's offered.
Bits and pieces are already open source with more to come: https://github.com/BreakaClub and https://github.com/godotjs/godotjs/
I think most of the people using Godot are not aware how powerful and ergonomic GodotJS actually is. All the intellisense and completion suggestions goodness when using GodotJS is a godsent.
Can you tell us a bit more about how making breaka club with GodotJS has been going for you?
- Are you using Godot as kind of a rendering frontend while your TypeScript code is rather self-contained and only interacts sparingly with the APIs exposed via GodotJS or is everything deeply intertwined? I'm curious because I'm still looking for a good GDScript replacement. I really dislike GDScript so much :(
- How has performance been? I'd imagine V8 with JIT be a lot faster than GDScript and probably within 2-3x of C#? But I guess one wouldn't be able to use V8 JIT on consoles or iOS? I wonder if the performance hit would be tolerable.
- Do you still have high-performance code you write with e.g. godot-cpp and if so, how's easy is it to make those things interact?
- I saw that there have been thoughts about migrating GodotJS to a GDExtension but it's not easy it seems? Would be a great long-term goal imo because not having to use a custom engine build and instead just plug in a GDExtension would be pretty convenient.
- I assume that one cannot use stuff like the node file system API or such things and one has to restrict themselves to JavaScript/TypeScript code that would also run in the browser?
Sorry for the flood of questions, no need to answer them all. Still curious about all of those things :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46844990
Edit: Oh, it was Adventure Maker! And it had a free version: https://www.adventuremaker.com/ — Apparently stuff like scripting and sprites do exist, but only in the paid version. It's cool the website is still around.
Such a wonderful engine.
https://docs.escoria-framework.org/en/devel/
The problem with these engines is you need to become familiar with both Godot as well as the point&click extension making them less suited as a first adventure authoring platform.