Rick Lane speaks with Wadjet Eye Games about the most prolific game engine you’ve never heard of
While the majority of engines are designed to cater for a broad range of game types, Adventure Game Studio is entirely focused on a single genre – 2D adventures in the vein of those developed by LucasArts in its heyday. Yet unlike SCUMM, which was evolved to be used by a very specific set of people, AGS is a one-stop design shop intended for everyone regardless of skill level.
‘There’s something very powerful about working with the tool that knows exactly what you’re trying to do,’ says Dave Gilbert, CEO of Wadjet Eye Games, a New York studio that’s created 15 titles using AGS over the past decade. ‘You want to create a character; it knows what a character is. It knows that a character walks and interacts with things; that it has an inventory, a walk cycle and a talking animation … the engine just knows all that.’
Adventure Game Studio was created back in the mid-1990s by an enthusiastic teenage programmer named Chris Jones. A lover of classic adventure games, Jones fancied trying his hand at making one of his own. Without any game creation software easily accessible at that point, Jones decided to build some himself.
Jones’ first prototype, Adventure Creator, was completed in 1995, but by that point, he’d decided he lacked the design skills necessary to build an adventure game, so he abandoned the project entirely. A couple of years later, he returned to Adventure Creator, and decided to make it freely available online as an updated program called Adventure Game Studio. The response he received, along with the resulting games that were built with it, motivated him to support AGS, for free, for the next ten years.
In terms of features, AGS bears a certain amount in common with GameMaker, using a combination of comprehensive drop-down menus and simplified scripting commands that enable developers to take an adventure game project from start to finish, only leaving the program to import files such as sprites and sounds. Its functions include the ability to edit rooms, write dialogue directly into the game, design customised inventories and interfaces, and so on.
Unlike GameMaker, however, AGS can assume knowledge of the game you’re trying to make, and cater its tools towards specific purposes. It can provide hard-coded commands, including mouse-cursor functions such as ‘Walk To’ or ‘Look At’ right off the bat, while also offering template commands you can adapt to your particular design.
This doesn’t mean you can start designing a game immediately – it needs to be learned like any other tool, but doing so is a lot easier than, for example, learning how to program in C, or deciphering a more complex engine such as Unity.
It was the simple and specific nature of AGS that attracted Gilbert in the early 2000s. ‘There was this weird period of my life where the World Trade Center had just gone down, I lived in New York and I was looking for something to keep my mind off stuff,’ Gilbert says. ‘So I downloaded the engine, played around with the tutorials and made a little game. What appealed to me at the time was that I was able to just do it. There wasn’t really anything else like that available.’
Fourteen years and fifteen games later, Gilbert and his team at Wadjet Eye know the engine inside out.
The team’s games include the critically acclaimed Blackwell series, a single adventure that ran over the course of five games, and Resonance, co-programmed by developer Vince Twelve and Wadjet Eye’s CTO Janet Gilbert.
‘I’d say Resonance was our most ambitious game on a technical level. We had a lot of really slick interfaces and graphical effects, and all sorts of neat little tricks and fun little things to do that had never really been done in an AGS game before.’ The features include an innovative memory system that runs alongside the traditional inventory, which enables you to store ‘memories’ taken from the environment and use them later in conversation.
During its lifetime, AGS has formed the basis of thousands of adventure games, but the past few years have proved difficult for the software. Between 1999 and 2006, Chris Jones constantly supported AGS, releasing an updated version of the engine approximately once a month, free for anyone to use. Then in 2007, Jones decided to step back from the engine, releasing the source code to the community and moving on to other projects unrelated to AGS.
Since then, the process of updating AGS has been complicated. With no single individual in charge of the updates, it has been up to the community to pool together and attempt to update AGS when necessary. Updates have been released since then, which is an achievement in itself, but the process is much slower, with multiple differing version of the program available.
‘It was very nice having a singular vision,’ says Gilbert. ‘[Jones] made a new version of AGS, and that was officially the new version – all new features went through him; it was this nice way of updating the engine; and sadly now no one has really officially stepped up to the plate.’
Many of the problems lie with compatibility. Gilbert notes myriad issues with dual-monitor setups, mouse acceleration and interfacing with other programs such as Steam. ‘My wife is the real programmer type and, from what she tells me, AGS uses a lot of really old, outdated libraries, and things get a little weird as more modern systems stop using and supporting those libraries.’
The most prominent flaws with AGS all relate to resolution. You can’t adjust from full-screen to windowed mode, for example, and if you change your resolution setting, AGS alters your monitor settings to fit the game, rather than altering the game to fit your monitor settings. ‘Ironically, the more souped-up, and fancy and powerful your gaming rig, the less likely it is that an AGS game will work on your computer,’ Gilbert says.
Moreover, as technology accelerates, AGS falls further behind. Wadjet Eye has even offered to pay someone to grab AGS by the horns and update the engine to suit its needs, but so far nobody has stepped up. Now Gilbert is pondering whether to continue using AGS for Wadjet Eye’s next game, or learning an alternative engine, which in itself could take the same time as making a game.
‘For the majority of players, it works fine. My only worry is that it won’t be fine in another decade. It won’t get updated very fast, so that’s my concern. However, it’s pretty damn amazing for an engine that was built in 1999 to still have relevance today,’ Gilbert says.