Amateur Adventure Games
An amateur adventure game is a fangame or a freeware computer game belonging to the adventure genre. The amateur adventure game scene emerged in the mid to late 1990s as commercial adventure games became more rare, thus encouraging gamers to make their own games. (The situation is comparable to that of Interactive fiction.) The popularity of the Internet was increasing at the time, making easy distribution of games as well as adventure game creation systems - such as the popular Adventure Game Studio (AGS) - possible. Nowadays the amateur scene is mainly centered around the AGS community and a few adventure-related websites.
History
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 apparently heavily inspired by SCUMM. SCRAMM and its rival, Glumol, were never finished, and people soon either abandoned their projects altogether or began looking for engines that weren't vaporware. Initially engines called AGS, AGAST and SLUDGE gathered the most prominent following, AGS being clearly in the lead when it came to the size of the community and the amount of games being released per year.
As the engines have developed over time and their stability has increased, they have a long time ago surpassed the functionality and ease of use 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 use DirectX's 3D acceleration capabilities to enable smoother and faster rendering of sprites, especially making special effects such as transparency faster to render.
List of popular engines
Freeware
- AGAST
- AGS
- Wintermute
Shareware
- SLUDGE
Commercial
- Visionaire
See also
External links