Adventure Game Studio

Adventure games are not complicated from a technical point of view, because most of them use static environments or pre-rendered scenes instead of the usual dynamic worlds from other genres. However, the developers must pay additional attention to the story, the characters and the puzzles, because that’s what keeps the players distracted from the lack of continuous action.

Adventure Game Studio is a pretty basic and beginner-friendly tool that can be used to create a classic point-and-click adventure game from the ground up. You do not need much knowledge on the subject in order to begin working on a project, but coding know-how always comes in handy in such situations. Scripts must be hand-written anyway, although you do not necessarily need to integrate them into your game.

To begin with, the application comes with a series of predefined templates you can use, but a blank project is also available. These templates include a lot of the most basic components and it makes your work a lot easier, although they also constrain you in some regards. Other than that, you have complete freedom over your project, as long as you do not expect too much to begin with.

Besides the actual game world and the sprites that are used to animate the characters, you can also add music, environmental sounds, cursors and GUIs, which means that you can really put in a lot of effort into the final product. Entire dialog trees can be included too, but that aspect requires imagination and creativity, since the application’s only purpose in this regard is to organize the text.

When it comes to how the game is rendered and how it looks at the end of the day, you should know that there are two built-in rendering modes: DirectDraw 5 and Direct3D 9. A variety of resolutions are available as well, ranging from the classic 320x200, all the way to the 4:3 favorite, 1024x768. In the end, it’s all about how much detail you are willing to put in the graphics.

When it’s all said and done, Adventure Game Studio may not allow you to create the next The Walking Dead franchise, but it may be powerful enough to tell a good story and have some fun while doing so. Hence, if you want to learn how to make a game and you need a simple starting point, the application at hand may very well be one of your best bets. You can download both the installer and portable editions from this page.