Point-and-Click Adventure Tools

As the capability of PCs to display graphics improved, they began to gain importance in the adventure genre. At first only additional illustration, they soon became part of the gameplay: The point-and-click adventure was born.

It might be added that there were graphical adventures without mouse support, too; playing them was usually a somewhat limited fun, as it meant postioning the cursor with the arrow keys. Menu-driven adventures were never popular outside Japan, where they are the dominant form.

There are programs that let you create your own graphical adventure game (as opposed to interactive fiction with added media content):

• Adventure Game Studio lets you create a point-and-click adventure in Sierra or Lucas Arts style. The editor runs on Win9x/ME/2000/XP only, the game engine is available in both MS-DOS and Windows DirectX versions. There are lots of games for download on the homepage, 15 of them "full-length games." Most of them have their own websites:
  • Larry Vales has been the hero of three games by now.
  • Gaea Fallen
  • Tierra Entertainment recreates some older Sierra adventures (King's Quest, Quest for Glory) with the help of this engine.
  • Greek AGS Community
  So obviously Adventure Game Studio is well-tested, well-supported and has a lively community. And these are the most important points for any game maker.
• Game Builder Lite does not have any official homepage, the link leads you to a general download page. It was created in 1993 by MVP Software, but is not mentioned anywhere on their webpage. It is supposedly inferior to the abovementioned AGS.
• Indiana Java & the Network of Doom is a small (download size <1MB) Java application.

  This is not a GAG ! Indeed, this is not a Graphic Adventure Game (G.A.G.) as you might think. Rather, it's a system to create and run 2D graphic adventure games. No Java knowledge required! No internet connection required! It includes a small fully playable adventure, for you to have fun immediately. It's entirely written in Java, so non-Wintel users can also enjoy playing and creating that kind of games. I wanted it to be a strong base for future developments, so this is not just another little applet. It's intended to be run offline. The engine is free for non-commercial use.

  Features:

  • 24 bit color support
  • MIDI, RMI, AU and WAV support
  • AVI, MOV, MPEG1 support
  • Path searching
  • Complete "old style" interface
  • Scrolling in any direction
  • Recorded speech support
  • Several controlable characters
  • Alpha transparency
  • Full-screen support
  • Save & Load games

  Last update on the page was 1999-10-09. The link to the forum seems to be broken. I have never seen it mentioned outside its homepage (a google search returned some sites linking to it, but little more) and cannot say if it has any kind of community or already been used to design games.