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Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games
- jzemeocala 9mo agoany word how it works with wine on linux?
- valorzard 9mo agoFrom 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
- Risse 9mo agoMan, 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!
- npsomaratna 9mo agoDidn't they remake Quest for Glory II and a couple of the Kings Quest games in this? Fun times.
- BeetleB 9mo agoYup. This is the one.
- alexhans 9mo agoAmong 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 Shoutout to classic community games like - Cirque De Zale https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/377/ 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-stranger/ https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/269-5-days-a...
- BeetleB 9mo agoThe Trilby series is fantastic!
- salty-horse 9mo agoHurray for Cirque De Zale. 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 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/ 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-or-author:ThreeOhFour;newest-releases:checked 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/ 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/ 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 https://www.grundislav.games/Ben-Jordan.html
- salty-horse 9mo agoForgot about Erin Robinson's games, Spooks and Nanobots: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/search/&q=title-or-author:The+Ivy;newest-releases:checked https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/search/&q=title-o... Nanbobots was later reimagined as a commercial game with Wadjet Eye.
- paulryanrogers 9mo agoBig fan of Chandler's art, though "Old Skies" kept the characters on the same plane, never moving away from "camera" POV. So the whole game felt very flat to me. Hopefully his future works will scale the characters.
- s-macke 9mo agoBlast 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. [0] https://www.maniac-mansion-mania.com/index.php/en/ https://www.maniac-mansion-mania.com/index.php/en/
- armcat 9mo agoOh 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!
- technothrasher 9mo agoAnybody 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set
- oddthink 9mo agoI loved that thing. I don't know how many hours I spent on that. I wish I could my kids interested in anything half as creative.
- WillAdams 9mo agoThere was also _Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures_: https://www.gogdb.org/product/1432650732 https://www.gogdb.org/product/1432650732 which I greatly enjoyed, and my NWN character, even got a cameo in one fan-made adventure.....
- xoxxala 9mo agoI loved those gold box games. Wanted to get into FRUA, but it just didn't work for me and I didn't have a lot of time to really dig into the details. Those game editors are tough to build. I worked on Bard's Tale Construction Set and it had a lot of issues. My claim to fame is filing the bug report that led to cut & paste being added to the scripting editor.
- WillAdams 9mo agoIt's a lot easier to use if you just find and download adventures made by other folks --- there were a fair number, but not sure if they're still around (I hope so).
- iamflimflam1 9mo agoThere was also STAC for the Atari ST - absolutely loved it. Unfortunately my artistic skills were not up to making anything good. https://www.ifwiki.org/STAC https://www.ifwiki.org/STAC
- Vedor 9mo agoI 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.
- armcat 9mo agoGemini Rue is probably one of the best game stories I have ever seen. What Joshua Nuernberger did there is amazing. The "twist" that occurs there in the final third is something else. And it's built using AGS.
- sersi 9mo agoAnother great AGS made game is Technobabylon. That and Gemini Rue are my two favourite Wadjet Eyes Games
- darthcircuit 9mo agoGemini rue is one of my favorite games ever, not just point and click.
- brynet 9mo agoYes they still do, and fun fact, SummVM has integrated support for AGS a few releases back, so one of my favourite titles from Wadjet Eye Games, Unavowed, works great on a ton of different OSes/platforms. https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=AGS/Games https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=AGS/Games I've played it on OpenBSD before! https://pobsd.chocolatines.org/2953591878 https://pobsd.chocolatines.org/2953591878
- b3lvedere 9mo agoThe developer commentary in Unavowed also explains some of the technical challenges they had with using AGS.
- j-kent 9mo ago
- brynet 9mo agoScummVM added support for AGS a few releases back, it works great for a number of free/commercial games. https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=AGS/Games https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=AGS/Games
- vunderba 9mo agoWow, 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!) https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags
- RobotToaster 9mo agoIf anyone was concerned about the nonstandard license, the FSF says this: >This license is a free software license, compatible with the GPL thanks to the relicensing option in section 4(c)(ii).
- the_af 9mo agoInteresting. I remember the original author of AGS was strongly against open source back in the day. Nice to see he either recanted, or handed the reigns to someone who wasn't opposed.
- kleiba 9mo agoOr, if you've always wanted to make an old-school text adventure game directly on your Commodore 64 (emulator), there's this: https://www.protovision.games/games/d42.php?language=en https://www.protovision.games/games/d42.php?language=en
- goopypoop 9mo agofinally now i can kill pippin
- maximgeorge 9mo ago[dead]
- ndr42 9mo agoI 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... :-(
- a-dub 9mo agothere are also several oss editors for the original sierra agi and sci formats.
- robertlagrant 9mo agoI remember making a very simple adventure game from scratch in BBC Basic in the mid 90s. Good times. Code immediately lost on reboot.
- j-kent 9mo agoI 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.
- plagiarist 9mo agoI had that! I wanted to write a game like Monkey Island but couldn't work out how to do an inventory system with what was available. I found some blog on the internet where an enterprising soul with the same issue described using prime numbers and a modulo calculation to make an integer act as a bitfield. I wish I could reread that for the nostalgia, seemed like magic at the time. I moved on to RPG Maker and that was more my speed. I was really into JRPGs at that time. I accomplished absolutely nothing with either software. I was stuck on imagining the perfect art and perfect story. That inaction remains in me to this day.
- fragmede 9mo agoperfect is the enemy of the good
- taneq 9mo agoHaha same! I had Klik and Play, and The Games Factory. I spent ages trying to implement side scrolling in KnP. The crazy complicated action grids for the TGF example games with all their hidden objects to implement game mechanics helped convince me that it was easier to just learn C++. :)
- zdc1 9mo agoRPG 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.
- agjmills 9mo agoThis reminds me of OHRRPGCE
- shdon 9mo agoI'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.
- bdbdbdb 9mo agoAGS is cool but I wish they'd make a version for macos. You need to use wine to run it
- the_af 9mo agoIs it too hard to port?
- shakna 9mo agoThey did. [0] > 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 https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/tree/master/OSX
- Benjamin_Dobell 9mo agoI'm building a modern platform for kids to hand draw their own games: https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids 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 https://github.com/BreakaClub and https://github.com/godotjs/godotjs/ https://github.com/godotjs/godotjs/
- roflcopter69 9mo agoHi! 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 :)
- mathnode 9mo agoIt's a lovely facelift of their website, but am I correct in saying the editor is Windows only, still?
- armcat 9mo agoIt looks like you can build/run on Linux/Mac as well: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags?tab=readme-ov-file#building-and-running https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags?tab=readme-ov-fil...
- geophph 9mo agoRandomly 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!
- ChicagoDave 9mo agoJust announced beta release of my own parser-based IF platform: https://sharpee.net/ https://sharpee.net/ built in Typescript. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46844990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46844990
- TazeTSchnitzel 9mo agoDoes 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/ 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.
- i80and 9mo agoAdventure Maker and Bryce3D were an S-tier way of making very nonsensical games as a child! It would be cool to have a FOSS redux of it, to be honest.
- Fr0styMatt88 9mo agoAGS is awesome and well and truly battle tested in terms of having actual full commercial games made with it. Such a wonderful engine.
- mdtrooper 9mo agoThere is another adventure framework as plugin for Godot. It is Escoria: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset?user=escoria https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset?user=escoria https://docs.escoria-framework.org/en/devel/ https://docs.escoria-framework.org/en/devel/
- bzzzt 9mo agoThere's also 'Popochiu': https://github.com/carenalgas/popochiu https://github.com/carenalgas/popochiu Both seem to be in maintenance mode though and are not as battle tested as AGS. 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.
- HellDunkel 9mo agoI was such an adventure game fan as a kid. 2025 was a great year for point & click adventures and 2026 could be even better!
- sora2video 9mo ago[dead]
- 4pkjai 9mo agoI started off using this back in 2009 when I wanted to make an adventure game. Really enjoyed it back then, great to see it’s still around
- kqr 9mo agoIf you want to create an adventure game but your visual skills are lacking, I recommend looking into text adventures! There are great tools for making them these days: - Inform 7 has annoying syntax but an amazing IDE; - Inform 6 is somewhat object oriented, has a good Emacs mode and decades of tools; - Dialog takes the evaluation model of Inform 7 and dresses it in sensible syntax but it is a bit niche so tools are lacking; etc. The Wise-Woman's Dog is one of the best adventures I played in 2025: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
- perryprog 9mo agoFunny, I just started playing The Wise-Woman’s Dog yesterday—it really is excellent! I’d also secondly endorse Dialog. It’s a really intuitive way to think about the game world as a whole without having to worry about Inform 7’s AppleScript-esque syntax. It’s also grown quite a bit since the community started their own fork: https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog
- mwigdahl 9mo agoPersonally I really enjoy the syntax of Inform 7, but tastes vary and I certainly understand not liking it. TADS 3 is another option if you prefer a more object-oriented, ALGOL-ish syntax with equivalent power. The IFComp has run for decades now. If you are interested in good adventures, running through the highly-rated games from over the years is a good idea. The IFComp website is at https://ifcomp.org/ https://ifcomp.org/
- adamrezich 9mo agoInform 7 is actually kind of fun to write once you get the hang of it. What's interesting though is, at least in my experience, LLMs are terrible at generating Inform 7 code specifically because it's so uncanny-valley-similar to English.
- ciroduran 9mo agoI made a game with Adventure Game Studio about 20 years ago, and Windows being Windows, it still runs fine on modern Windows, although I lost the source to it. AGS is still a good engine for making games! AdventureX (https://www.adventurexpo.org/ https://www.adventurexpo.org/) is an annual convention held in London, UK (next one is 7-8th Nov this year), and lots of AGS users gather here. Some people are making games, while others are making modules for integrating libraries or new platforms (for handheld consoles, for example). BTW, I hadn't realised they modernised their website. Until very recently they still had their version from 2006, looked quite nostalgic these days.