- Amateur adventure game
An amateur adventure game is a
freeware computer game belonging to the adventuregenre . The amateur adventure game scene emerged in the mid to late1990 s, when releases of new commercial adventure games became more rare and easy distribution of games andgame engine s was made possible by increased access to theInternet , thus encouraging players to make games of their own. This situation was similar to that faced by players ofinteractive fiction . Nowadays the amateur scene is mainly centered around theAdventure Game Studio (AGS) community and a few adventure-related websites.History
Before the rise of amateur adventure games, the primary adventure game engines available were modifications of
Sierra On-Line 's existing engines, interactive fiction programs, and the Macintosh-only scripting systemWorld Builder . These development systems were often commercial and their usage wasn't widespread. This era ended when major game developers such as Sierra andLucasArts came to the conclusion that adventure games were no longer a profitable business and abandoned the genre.Another factor that encouraged people to take up independent development was the fact that the new amateur engines were relatively easy to use and that the basic programming tasks for an adventure game were quite simple. Adventure games were well-suited for relatively simple script-based development systems, because they could be in low resolution and have a point-and-click interface, and because the game logic itself didn't need to be difficult. Instead of technological advancements, the appeal of the games was in the story, characters, and puzzles.
In the early days of the scene, most aspiring designers were divided into two groups, those using AGS and those planning on using SCRAMM, a system heavily inspired by
LucasArts 'SCUMM . SCRAMM was never finished, and people soon either abandoned their game projects altogether or began looking for engines that weren'tvaporware . Other vaporware systems included RoBoT, which was an open-source community project based on another engine called BoT that was abandoned by its developer. Initially AGS,AGAST andSLUDGE gathered the most prominent following, AGS being clearly in the lead when it came to the size of the community and the number of games being released per year.As the engines have developed over time and their stability has increased, they have long since surpassed the functionality of the development systems of most commercial studios, including
LucasArts ' SCUMM and Sierra's SCI. For example, a relatively new engine, called Wintermute, was the first to useDirectX 's3D acceleration support to enable smoother and fasterrender ing of sprites, especially makingspecial effect s such as transparency faster to render.Additionally, there has been a rise of
Macromedia Flash developers who have produced popular adventure games such asMOTAS (Mystery of Time and Space) andCrimson Room (and its sequels) which make use of different action scripts and effects not found in other game engines. These games were made popular with the rise of Flash Game/Movie communities such asNewgrounds .Engines and games
Adventures games are popular in the independent game development scene, and many toolkits have emerged to create them. Most, but not all, are IDE based scripting engines. Some are just a script language or do not feature one at all.
Systems include:
*Adventure Game Studio (AGS) (Freeware)
*AGAST (Freeware) ("discontinued")
*SLUDGE (Open Source)
*SCI Studio (Freeware) ("inactive")
* Visionaire (Freeware/Shareware)
*WinAGI Game Development System ("inactive")
* Wintermute (Donationware)
*World Builder (Freeware) ("discontinued")The
DarkBASIC orDarkBASIC Professional engines can also be used for adventure games, and a few modern commercial adventure games have been built using theVirtools middleware system.ee also
*
Adventure games
*Interactive fiction External links
* [http://www.adventuregamers.com/underground Adventure Gamers Underground] News
* [http://www.adventuredevelopers.com Adventure Developers] News, resources and tutorials for developers
* [http://reloaded.org/Adventure-Games/ Reloaded] Downloadable freeware adventures
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.