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/

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.....

And PAW for the Speccy.

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

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...

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

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.

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!

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

The Trilby series is fantastic!

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.

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

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

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

“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.

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

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).

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

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

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

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 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.

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++. :)

finally now i can kill pippin

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 :)

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

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.

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

Is it too hard to port?

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

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

Surprised it isn’t on linux