Software Evaluation

To date I have evaluated and rejected 4 programs which do not require programming knowledge in order to build the game. I have another 3 which have come to my attention which I will be evaluating.

3D Adventure Studio
An editor for creating adventure games. It consists of two parts:

• An editor: To allow you to create your own 3D Adenture games
• A runtime engine: To play games created with 3D Adventure Studio

This package is out of Norway and is still under construction according to the site, however looking at the download pages, nothing has been updated since 2003. The package came with a 15 page tutorial which was poorly written. I spent most of one day working with the software. The programs biggest disadvantage is one must repeatedly tap the arrow keys in the editor to zoom in and out when playing the game. The results of how the program looks and works wasn't worth the effort. Further the game could not be modified at this point to add characters, dialogue etc.

Here is a picture of an outdoor scene

Adventure Game Studio

Adventure Game Studio (AGS for short) allows for the creatation of point-and-click adventure games. It consists of a development environment, and run-time engine. The game interface is fully customizable. AGS came with an extensive tutorial and is still supported through Wikis and a support team should questions arrive. However the resulting game is 2D and very simplistic looking. The software as far as I could discover after 2 days of experimentation is only customizable within pre-existing perameters and thus was not suitable for developing my Heroine's Journey.

Here is a sample of the software's interface

Game Factory 2

From the company

"The Games Factory provides everything you need to manufacture Arcade games, Platform games, Adventures, Screen Savers, and much, much, more. You simply click on an object, drag it to the play field, and click on the action it should perform. We supply all the heroes, monsters, powerups, and other objects you need, plus the sound and music for your games. Of course, you can easily add your own, custom items if you choose."

GF2 had the best tutorial of all the software packages I evaluated, including both pictures and words, which made it easier to follow. The tutorials were seperated into 14 steps or lessons. Though the company claimed that by following the tutorial a game could be created in an hour I found in reality it took 3+ hours to build the example I will be showing below. Without purchasing the complete package I cannot conclusively rule out that the program is incapable of being customized to my requirements, however following a series of emails with the support department and the resulting arcade style game I have decided to keep looking around.

Here is the resulting game

Here is the URL to view it directly from YouTube if you cannot see this embedded version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbayFAJ6jzg

Reality Factory

The last software package I evaluated was Reality Factory, a freely available toolkit that allows for the creation of complete, commercial quality games without knowing any programming. It was the most promising of all the software though harder to learn then some of the others. It's major draw back is that it is a shooter, and hence not suitable for my Heroine's journey. I contacted support to see if the game could be modified to be an adventure game and was told a couple of people online were experiementing with doing so and I should contact the forum, but they could not help with any modifications because they designed a shooter. I posted to the forum but was never contacted back. I spent 2 days working with the software to get the following example:

Here is the URL to view it directly from YouTube if you cannot see this embedded version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZacBMb6vn_Q