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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.maniac-mansion-mania.com/index.php/en/

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!)

https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags

This reminds me of OHRRPGCE

Or, 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

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!

I remember making a very simple adventure game from scratch in BBC Basic in the mid 90s. Good times. Code immediately lost on reboot.

ScummVM 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

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!

there are also several oss editors for the original sierra agi and sci formats.

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... :-(

[dead]