There are a few members in this forum who already have developed their own adventure games.

How about you?
Have you ever dreamt of developing your own game, planning to try it, or already working on something?

Many years ago you needed to develop your own engine/code to be able to create such a game. Then we got Adventure Game Studio (AGS) and other tools, some of them based on Flash. Then Visionaire Studio. And Adventure Creator or PowerQuest for Unity, and there is Godot, or Unreal. Lots of options. A simple text adventure / interactive fiction can be realized easily with Twine, another tool available for free.

Developing a game is still difficult when you want to have a good and complex story and/or fresh ideas for puzzles or interactions that are supposed to be enjoyed by players (and not be boring or frustrating). Or when you need graphics. There are LLM/"AI" Tools nowadays, but those come with other - ethical - issues.

And of course, there are many adventures we can just enjoy, without adding our own. 
But maybe everyone of us has some story to tell that could be told as an interactive adventure?

So, have you ever tried developing a game, or even completed one, or would you like to try it?

I'm plugging away at a couple of text adventures. Puzzle design is the biggest challenge for me.

Yeah, I'm working on my own adventure game. It's still at a stage when it's too early to share screenshots, etc though...

For the tech side of things I've developed my own adventure game framework that uses the Godot engine. As I needed something that could be used to build fully 3D adventure games and most (all?) of the preexisting publicly available frameworks/engines are for 2D adventure games, building my own seemed to be my only path forward. Even if there was an existing alternative out there that seemingly could have worked, I still think I'd have went with building my own to be honest. I have my own ideas about how I want a 3D adventure game to work so I want a framework I can continually adapt to those ideas rather than changing my ideas simply to match the capabilities of something else. Since I have a background in game programming I knew what I was in for and, while it's taken longer than expected as these things always do, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at with it right now. I've built out most of the essential features and things are working nicely together in the various prototype testing scenes I've made along the way while working on it.

In parallel to working on the tech, I'm now at my third, and hopefully final, attempt at finding a story concept that is achievable for me as a solo developer to finish. I shelved my first attempts each in their early writing/planning phases when in both cases it became unavoidably clear their scope would require a small team, which is not an option for this first game. With this third idea I think I've finally found something that has the right balance of not requiring too many assets for the characters, props and environments, yet still allowing depth when it comes to the story and puzzle design.

Long story short (how uncharacteristic of me), for many years I used to enjoy making little hobbyist games in Game Maker by Yoyo Games, and later on creating numerous little text adventures in ADRIFT. Never published anything online though.

Last year, I was greatly inspired to get back into game writing again. I've written a 19,000 word draft for an absurdist comedy adventure game.

I think about this constantly. And then I remember that it is a rather large undertaking that I don't have time for.

Have you ever dreamt of developing your own game, planning to try it, or already working on something?

Thanks for making this thread. Finally a topic for us to discuss the game development aspect of adventures.

There are LLM/"AI" Tools nowadays, but those come with other - ethical - issues.

Rest assured, I will never use it. Put simply, when it comes to both adventure games and games in general, I like the notion of humans creating artwork exclusively for humans to consume and enjoy. I'm not interested in offloading that creative and intimate task to the robot patrol guards of the digital panopticon. This is just a personal opinion, but I strongly dislike generative A.I technology, so here's a useful link at your discretion if you wish to avoid games using it, along with details of how much was used in total:

https://www.giantbomb.com/generative-ai/...857/games/

I'm plugging away at a couple of text adventures. Puzzle design is the biggest challenge for me.

Neat! Which text adventure engine are you using to create them, if you don't mind me asking? I've usually used ADRIFT.

For what it's worth, I've always cared more about interactions than puzzles in text adventures, but that's just me.

For the tech side of things I've developed my own adventure game framework that uses the Godot engine. As I needed something that could be used to build fully 3D adventure games and most (all?) of the preexisting publicly available frameworks/engines are for 2D adventure games, building my own seemed to be my only path forward.

Extremely impressive!

Are you aiming for a commercial release or freeware of your adventure game?

Were you thinking of using the AGH forum members as beta testers or just doing in-house testing only?

I think about this constantly.  And then I remember that it is a rather large undertaking that I don't have time for.

Small-scale text adventures are always an option as something to create instead.

Besides, good things come in small packages, take for instance in the hidden gems thread where I mentioned about one of my favourite game demos called Odd, a super small 5 minute game which stayed emotionally with me an entire decade later, and it even impressed BobVP when he played it.

Secondarily, you can express your love for adventure games by writing reviews instead, a rewarding form of feedback from like-minded enthusiasts that may even end up swaying their viewpoint.

Lastly, you could take part in a community playthrough and offer your opinions about the game, like how we did in October.

I'm plugging away at a couple of text adventures. Puzzle design is the biggest challenge for me.

I would also like to know which tool you are using for those. Puzzles, oh puzzles ... none of my solo games have them. I mean there are very primitive "puzzles" everyone can solve. But I was never into puzzle design, so that's fine for me. I also prefer the story/interactions/explorations aspect in adventure games. So when you finish them, please share.

@ClusterLizard
Long story short (how uncharacteristic of me), for many years I used to enjoy making little hobbyist games in Game Maker by Yoyo Games, and later on creating numerous little text adventures in ADRIFT. Never published anything online though.

Last year, I was greatly inspired to get back into game writing again. I've written a 19,000 word draft for an absurdist comedy adventure game.

Oh, interesting! Never heard of Adrift. Why didn't you publish them after all? Itch.io is such a great platform for sharing your games with other indie game enthusiasts. Would the games still be playable on current systems?

And it's great that you are working on a game again (at least on the writing). I guess it's supposed to become text adventure as well?


@ClusterLizard
That framework sounds interesting. I wanted to try out Godot some day as well. But since I like working with Unity so much, it is difficult to actually decide creating something in another engine instead. Since I am not a programmer, I'll have to depend on given frameworks and tools (like AC for Unity).

Talking about AI/LLM:
I have to confess that I used it for the code/programming for two of my recent projects. It helped me very much to make my ideas come to life - for the pure functionality.
I don't think it is morally better than using LLM/AI for what's visible to players (or audio/voiceover!), since besides the "where does the LLM get its knowledge from" there is always also the ecological aspect of using them (power and water consumption ...). For me it was quite an interesting experience though to see if it is possible at all to achieve what I needed. And when people using LLM to generate images based on their text prompts - "it was the only way for me to make my ideas come to life" - I guess I would have to say the same about the generated code.

Are you aiming for a commercial release or freeware of your adventure game?

Commercial release. I may have a demo though.

Were you thinking of using the AGH forum members as beta testers or just doing in-house testing only?

I'll be looking for testers wherever I can find them when I'm nearer to releasing something in the future, so yeah absolutely. I don't think in house testing really counts when it's just your own computer(s).

I’ve been dreaming about building a game since primary school, but only got serious about it when I turned 30. My brother and I started developing our game in our spare time and have been working on it for three years now. I was afraid of starting for so long, but now I wish I started much sooner.

We don’t live in the same country (I’m in Belgium, he’s in Slovenia), and the game has become a shared hobby that gets us talking more. Without it, I’m pretty sure we’d only talk weekly or monthly instead of daily So even if the game will not be a success, it's already a win for us by just working on it.

We started with Unity and switched to Godot and for a 2d adventure game, I would recommend Godot much more.

Oooh, developing a game together with a sibling must be so awesome! Yes, the "success" definitley shouldn't matter, this game is yours.

Are you using some framework/plugin now for your Godot 2D adventure game, or are you just using the pure vanilla Godot functionality?