Choosing an adventure game authoring system

This might be off-topic, but I have no idea where else to post it.

I'm thinking about writing a series of small adventure games. I can do some 3D rendering / art / music / writing and so on, but I'm lost when it comes to choosing the right authoring software. To begin with, I know Adventure Game Studio is the "preferred" or most popular one out there, but I haven't seen any 1st person games made from their engine.

I'm thinking about making something that has Nancy Drew game controls - basically a series of static images strung together to form rooms. I'm trying to work with a 640x480 - 800x600 resolution, 16/32 bit color depth. I've taken a look at

SLUDGE
AGS
Adveture Maker

and those looks to be the currently supported. I took a look at AGAST! but there's no download link and the forums are down.

I really like SLUDGE, but I'm not sure if people are wiling to download and install a separate an engine to play my games. It just seems too demanding on the gamer. Adventure Maker looks promising but there aren't many games developed with it and the reviews tend to be negative.

I'm not a programmer (syntax is my enemy). Any ideas would be appreciated. I don't mind paying for the software, so it doesn't HAVE to be free like AGS. Director, however, is a bit TOO expensive. ^_^; I plan for my games to be postcard/freeware.

Lastly, here's a test render from one of my scenes. I'll have to go for lower resolution though - POVray took 2 hours.
http://img86.imageshack.us/img86/9286/lookintothekitchenom1.png

Good to hear of someone else thinking about making games! You've put some good effort into that scene (think about using JPG rather than PNG as the compression is better for images you post.)

Sludge is no longer so actively supported by its author which is an issue. Wintermute is well respected and is worth considering.

It's hard to do much if you don't want to do any scripting or programming - teaming up with someone else could be a good idea.

I second Wintermute engine ( http://www.dead-code.org ). Although you have to learn scripting language, it offers very powerful possibilities and down the road it's solid platform for developing adventure games without having to limit yourself.

And besides, Ghost in the Sheet has been developed using Wintermute.

Metamorphium, Wouldn't you like to declare your personal interest in the Wintermute engine ... you have contributed tutorials and you're a Moderator on their forums (not to mention using it for your own games)

Gremlin

gremlin: I did declare my personal interest in engine and community openly (not only by creating games with it). I am in no way associated with the engine itself as it's a sole creation of Jan "Mnemonic" Nedoma. I came a long way there using many different engines (torque, AGS etc.) only to drop my anchor in WME community. I don't know if commiting tutorials is a wrong thing to do, but recommending engine I've found myself excellent for adventure game creating is (I presume) answer to question about adventure game authoring systems.

As I've created Ghost in the Sheet in the way Sally(MG) wants to do - slide show etc. I *know* the engine is able to bring you from the point 0 to finished game.

In other words - what's exactly your problem with my post above?

Thanks guys - I'll keep the PNG thing in mind as well.

Wintermute struck me as a bit hard to learn to use, and the features list wasn't very clear about what the WindowEdit tool does. Well, first I'm going to start playing Ghost in the Sheet to see what it's capable of.

You may also want to consider the SCream engine, which is the authoring system used to make Scratches. While Scratches is done as a panoramic first-person view, I am pretty sure you can set the engine so that it only does slideshow mode.

Information about the engine can be found here:
http://www.nucleosys.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=11&sid=53edadbf4a135a4166e86aff954e301a

Good luck with your project!

Hello KevinM and welcome to GameBoomers!

For what you are talking about, it seems like Adventure Maker is the best fit. It's been used on the following games:

LifeStream
Shady Brook
Remedy
Hope Spring Eternal
Scavenger Hunter
..to name a few. All of those were 1st person slide show games.

You can actually get away with not doing any coding too if your game is simple enough.

After taking stock of what my computer is capable of, I'm going to go with 3rd person view. Mainly because it takes this machine around 1.5 hours to trace a 1024 x 768 image at medium quality with radiosity. I don't want to sacrifice quality, but if I do a third person view that means I only have to render 1 image per room instead of 8.

I'm also going to go with Wintermute since it seems to be the most versatile one of them all, even though it requires scripting. I took a look at the script library and it resembles C++. I've done some Torque script and I forgot to mention that once upon a time I was a front end dev (I just didn't LIKE scripting), so I should be able to handle it.

Good for you Sally! Look forward to seeing what you produce!

(You're after a photo-realistic look?)

Thank you! I WANT to go for a photo-realistic look, but if I really want to this thing is going to need a new graphics card. I guess I should get one anyway, but with high-antialias and no radiosity it takes 4 hours to render a 1024 x 768 image.

I'm probably going to post-process everything by making some photoshop actions to give everything more of a warm feel. The whole straight 3D render thing looks so...sanitary.

As far as I knew (but am ready to be proved wrong) ray tracing packages don't use the graphics card, buying a new graphics card won't speed them up.

Depends on the look you're after - I've seen scenes which are toon-shaded then textures applied to make them 'dirty' which look quite good.

I like very much the Carol Reed misteries. The forth one is E Side story and is better than the ones before it.
The walkthrouhg end said to look at the credits and I did and I see that it was made using Wintermute.
It is first person and made with camera photos.

Sally(MG) - Peter Smith is very correct. New GFX card won't help you. If you seek an upgrade for cutting down rendering times, upgrade RAM (2GB helps there) and CPU.

Sally, it's a good choice to go with Wintermute. We used Adventure Maker for the first 3 Carol Reed games, and switched to Wintermute for East Side Story, and haven't regretted it one bit.