Adventure Game Studio (AGS) is a fully developed graphical editor for game creation. It’s simple enough that coding novices can venture a decent stab at making games of their own. You can add sound, music, and ambient noise in various formats, even making a full talkie adventure with speech—packed into a single file. You can set up conversation systems, a completely customizable GUI, and multiple-player characters, all in a variety of color palettes and bits. Of course, the 16-color mode provides that true retro feel.

The official AGS site (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/) has much more information on this long-standing tool, and the download page (http://www.bigbluecup.com/acdload.htm) has everything you need to start. Thanks to a port of the runtime engine itself (http://drevil.warpcore.org/ags/), you can create games that run on Linux, although the actual creation tools still run only on Windows. For most standalone versions of the games themselves, you don’t need to know anything about the AGS editor. Game creators compile their games into a single .EXE file for distribution, so it’s a completely standalone system, unlike other creations such as Visual Pinball ( [Hack #80] ) that require you to have the editor installed before you can try out the game.

After installing AGS, load it up. Be prepared for a wealth of complex, but fairly usable, menu options and dialogs. By far the best sources for beginners are the official AGS Forums tutorial pages (http://www.bigbluecup.com/acdload.htm), which have both internal and external links to over 20 tutorials. Here are some tips to simplify your career:

To set up a walkable area, click on the Areas option in the Game Editor menus and sketch out and fill in the relevant areas with the paint tools. Combine these rooms with the Interaction Editor to carve out extravagant multiroom complexes in no time!

You can make a perfectly serviceable basic game using the GUI tools alone, but should you wish for more complexity, you can edit the scripts that your GUI games have produced. You’ll need to do this to add features such as producing random messages when the player does something multiple times, allowing the player to complete a certain puzzle if she has any one of three different objects, and making custom functions that can be called from anywhere in the script. Chris Jones, the author of AGS, has an excellent basic scripting tutorial at http://www.bigbluecup.com/actutor.htm.

While it’s fun to try to create your own games, it’s also well worth checking out what other talented amateurs have created. Just about every AGS-authored game ever created is available for free download, too, so there’s a wealth of great games to try.

Start at the AGS Awards page (http://www.sylpher.com/AGSAwards/Awards.htm), which highlights specific AGS games in several categories, stretching all the way back to 2001. Unfortunately, this site lacks download links, so either do a little Googling to find a game that catches your eye or wander over to the official AGS page for award winners (http://www.bigbluecup.com/games.php?category=102) and follow the links there. Most download links there redirect to personal pages; hopefully, someone will work on a central, permanent archive for these titles soon. Here are a few of the games you’ll find:

Figure 7-1. The great and now free Adventures Of Fatman

There are plenty of neat choices out there. Free games are proliferating because they’re so easy to create, and the gameplay is straightforward and does not rely on twitchy reflexes. It’s also worth noting that the official AGS games page (http://www.bigbluecup.com/games.php) offers a handy parental advisory rating per game for sex, violence, and nudity. You can check which titles have mature themes as well as those that don’t.