Amateur adventure game
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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
Before the rise of amateur adventure games during the late 1990s, the primary adventure game engines available were modifications of Sierra On-Line's existing engines, interactive fiction programs, and the Macintosh-only scripting system World Builder.In the early days of the 1990s scene, most aspiring designers were divided into two groups - those using AGS and those planning on using SCRAMM, a system heavily inspired by LucasArts' SCUMM. SCRAMM and its rival, Glumol, were never finished, and people soon either abandoned their game projects altogether or began looking for engines that weren't vaporware. Other vaporware systems included RoBoT, which was an open-source community project based off of another engine called BoT that was abandoned by its developer. 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 number 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. In recent years, there has seen a rise of Macromedia Flash developers who have produced popular adventure games such as MOTAS (Mystery of Time and Space), Crimson Room (and it's sequals) and Johnny RocketFingers 2 which make use of different actionscripts and effects not found in other game engines. These games were made popular with the rise of Flash Game/Movie communities such as Newgrounds.
List of popular engines
Freeware
Shareware
Commercial
See also
External links
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