Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games | Hacker News Reader

Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games

adventuregamestudio.co.uk

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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

I 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.

There was also _Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures_:

https://www.gogdb.org/product/1432650732

which I greatly enjoyed, and my NWN character, even got a cameo in one fan-made adventure.....

I 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.

It'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).

There 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

Yes! Until I saw the box cover illustration, I had totally forgotten that a high-school friend of mine and I worked months to build a Gauntlet clone on our 64K Apple ][+ machines due to the money it was costing us to play it at local game store/nerd magnet, "Dragon's Lair".

I seem to remember using one called AGT (adventure game toolkit) that I'd obtained from some sort of mail away floppy shareware service or something. It's wild to think of how much has changed in the last few decades!

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.

Also Eamon for Apple ][, I played with that a lot! And wrote my own in FORTH too.

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...

Those links really bring back the memories! I messed around with Akalabeth, Eamon, and Adventure Construction set all three back in the day.

Did you ever play The Prisoner? Where you go to the psychiatrist and he asks you all these questions, then the BASIC program crashes and prints an error message like "SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE ####" and beeps, leaving you at the "]" prompt?

But it's really an AppleSoft Basic Prompt Simulation to see how you will deal with the program crashing, judging you on if you go "CONT" or "NEW" or "RUN" or "CATALOG" or "LIST ####"!

What I didn't realize until I just looked it up now:

>In Prisoner 2 (the 1982 remake of the original), the game intentionally simulates a crash by showing a “Syntax error in line ###” message where the line number is actually your secret resignation code. The idea is that you might try to inspect or debug that line and type in the code, thereby revealing it — which is a loss condition because the game’s entire goal is to not give that number up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_(video_game)

>The game occasionally breaks the fourth wall by acknowledging that a game is being played.

It sure does!

Wow, no I didn't, but that sounds like a fantastic game mechanic!

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.

And PAW for the Speccy.

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

And the racing destruction set, and the pinball construction set. Heady days …

...and don't forget S.E.U.C.K.

Ohhh! I missed that! I guess I was too busy playing mail order monsters ...

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!

My family had a copy of Graphical Adventure Creator too, I similarly failed to produce anything of note but I do remember having a lot of fun playing around with it and trying to design screens.

I, rightly or wrongly, attribute my love of computers to playing around on the family CPC, I really want to encourage that in my kids but I don't know what the equivalent is - I'm pretty sure it's not buying them a tablet, Raspberry Pi 500 maybe?

Lots of kids still making games with engines like GameMaker Studio!

I think lots of kids will start playing around with Claude Code in this way as well.

If 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

Funny, 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

Personally 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/

Inform 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.

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...

The Trilby series is fantastic!

Hurray 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

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

Forgot about Erin Robinson's games, Spooks and Nanobots: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/search/&q=title-o...

Nanbobots was later reimagined as a commercial game with Wadjet Eye.

Big 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.

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.

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.

Gemini 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.

Another great AGS made game is Technobabylon. That and Gemini Rue are my two favourite Wadjet Eyes Games

Gemini rue is one of my favorite games ever, not just point and click.

Yes 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

I've played it on OpenBSD before!

https://pobsd.chocolatines.org/2953591878

The developer commentary in Unavowed also explains some of the technical challenges they had with using AGS.

Yes! my love for The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is what led me to AGS.

“Gemini Rue” and “Technobabylon” were my favorites, but they recently released a new title about time travel called “Old Skies”.

It actually made me cry and email the studio director. It was a masterpiece.

Old Skies was really great, stayed with me a long time

The Blackwell series was one of my first video game loves. The final game made me cry

I truly loved Old Skies! It was my favourite game last year.

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

If 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).

Interesting.

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.

Looking at the changelog, the open source license came in around September 1999.

Wow! 1999? I know I'm old when it feels almost like yesterday... (I knew it wasn't a recent development, but I still remember when I first heard of AGS as if it was yesterday!).

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/

that was my first game... damn good years.

see also Maniac Mansion Deluxe: a faithful remake of the original MM

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/401/

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.

I 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.

perfect is the enemy of the good

Haha 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++. :)

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 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/) 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.

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

finally now i can kill pippin

I'm building a modern platform for kids to hand draw their own games: 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 and https://github.com/godotjs/godotjs/

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 :)

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!

Didn't they remake Quest for Glory II and a couple of the Kings Quest games in this? Fun times.

Yup. This is the one.

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

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.

Adventure 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.

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.

I was such an adventure game fan as a kid. 2025 was a great year for point & click adventures and 2026 could be even better!

Just announced beta release of my own parser-based IF platform: https://sharpee.net/ built in Typescript.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46844990

AGS is cool but I wish they'd make a version for macos. You need to use wine to run it

Is it too hard to port?

They 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

Oh nice!

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.

This reminds me of OHRRPGCE

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!

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

I 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

AGS is awesome and well and truly battle tested in terms of having actual full commercial games made with it.

Such a wonderful engine.

It's a lovely facelift of their website, but am I correct in saying the editor is Windows only, still?

It looks like you can build/run on Linux/Mac as well: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags?tab=readme-ov-fil...

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

There is another adventure framework as plugin for Godot. It is Escoria: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset?user=escoria

https://docs.escoria-framework.org/en/devel/

There's also '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.

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!

any word how it works with wine on linux?

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

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... :-(

Surprised it isn’t on linux

At least the engine seem to be able to output linux games. IOS is also possible but not the Mac...

It works under Wine (with Crossover or the discontinued Whiskey Wine port).

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