In addition, to the engines Hexenwerk mentions, MS Word is a perfectly viable option to build an adventure game in. The first game I wrote was Witches and Bandits and Swords (Oh My) which was a choose-your-own-adventure style game for Kindle using Bookmarks and Hyperlinks to send you to different sections in the story based on your choices. The problems are obvious: no information can be saved, so you've got to rely on player honesty, and you can't call back to what the player did previously.

There is a certain purity about this, though, and anything beyond can quickly become a stress test of your determination, ability, resource and luck. You also constantly end up doing bizarre tasks which you didn't anticipate at all. For instance, recording your footseps a dozen times on different surfaces to work out which sound most foot-steppy 

@KrunchyFriedGames

This is VERY interesting!

Funny, this actually reminded me that the very first choose your own (text) adventure I created is older ... maybe from the year 2001. Probably written in MS Word as well back then, but I put it as html with hyperlinks on my website. It was in German, so even if I find a playable version again, it wouldn't make sense to share it here.

Making it playable on a kindle is a pretty cool idea.

I see that on itch.io you released it as a Unity game. Combined with the images, it really makes me want to create another text-image adventure as well.

@KrunchyFriedGames

This is VERY interesting!

Funny, this actually reminded me that the very first choose your own (text) adventure I created is older ... maybe from the year 2001. Probably written in MS Word as well back then, but I put it as html with hyperlinks on my website. It was in German, so even if I find a playable version again, it wouldn't make sense to share it here.

Making it playable on a kindle is a pretty cool idea.

I see that on itch.io you released it as a Unity game. Combined with the images, it really makes me want to create another text-image adventure as well.

Please do share. Even if people don't speak German, they can copy and paste into Deepl! It must have been so much harder developing a passable game in 2001. Now the battle seems to be as much about getting noticed as actually making the game. Sometimes I think developing a game back in the ZX Spectrum era would have been ideal. Just write something in BASIC, copy the game onto cassettes yourself, print and photocopy the cover art, and put ads in Your Sinclair magazine, and hope people send you cheques in the post for it.

Anyway, I'll stop taking this off-topic, unless we're broadening it to 'Developing your own adventure games in the 1980s' 

Are you using some framework/plugin now for your Godot 2D adventure game, or are you just using the pure vanilla Godot functionality?

The only two plugins we use are for Steam integration and an improved camera. Godot offers so many things out of the box that we didn’t feel like we needed one at the beginning. It was quite easy to build our own tools on top of Godot for adventure game specific features.

Our game only has a monologue system (the protagonist’s thoughts), but if we had dialogue, we would definitely use a plugin or library for that.
I’m not sure if you have any programming experience, but for me (someone coming for web development), Godot has been an amazing experience.

I have about five billion prototypes and design docs for various adventure game projects lying around that I'll never finish.

I have about five billion prototypes and design docs for various adventure game projects lying around that I'll never finish.

Have you considered whittling the 5,000,000,000 down to just one?  

Maybe select the best and take a vote- or even pick from a (very big) hat if you must!

When there are so many prototypes, I am sure there is one you could finish.

Uh ... yesterday I tried finding my old html game. I think it is on my external hdd, but I realized only yesterday that it is broken. I am trying now to saving as much as I can from it. Sectors were not found ... meh. But if I can save that old game (I hope so!) I'll make it available again for sure in a safer space than my local backup.

Have you considered whittling the 5,000,000,000 down to just one?  

Maybe select the best and take a vote- or even pick from a (very big) hat if you must!

When there are so many prototypes, I am sure there is one you could finish.

Space Quest Historian has successfully completed 12 different adventure games as part of The Adventure Think Tank. This is an extremely excellent ratio from 5 billion, in my humble opinion. 13 games if you also count Stair Quest, but we do not speak of that one.

I have been fiddling around with gamedev since before the turn of the millennium, but finished next to no games. I did currently release a non-point & click adventure game with a friend, though currently redesigning essentially the entire content(puzzles and such) because we did rush it a lot, and the end result isn't as good as we want it to be. It was coded in C++, which I relearned earlier this year because I hadn't touched that since the late 90s, when I was playing around with making Half-Life mods.

There's an old, unfinished AGS project of mine on a drive here somewhere that is a TLJ comedy fan game where you play as the everybody's favourite side character from that game, Zack. And you take control of him just as he hears April call him an asshole. I don't think I got further than making his room and the hall playable, and every time you interacted with April's door in the hall he would throw out one of dozens of absolutely terrible pickup lines.

On top of that I have at least four different adventure game projects that were started, where I coded all the gameplay features and then just left it collect dust: One 2D first person point & click game, one 2.5D third person point & click game, and a couple of 3D first person adventure games. I think those are all the adventure game specific projects I've had. Might be more, I've made a lot of unfinished games throughout the years.

And yes, making games is an undertaking. There are a lot of things people don't even think about that they need to work on, like getting sound effects, making all the menus, etc. But it's also a lot of fun, and I highly suggest anyone give it a try if they're interested! And just start working on something simple.

Have you considered whittling the 5,000,000,000 down to just one?  

Maybe select the best and take a vote- or even pick from a (very big) hat if you must!

When there are so many prototypes, I am sure there is one you could finish.

Space Quest Historian has successfully completed 12 different adventure games as part of The Adventure Think Tank. This is an extremely excellent ratio from 5 billion, in my humble opinion. 13 games if you also count Stair Quest, but we do not speak of that one.

Naturally, I've just googled Stair Quest! Definitely going on the download list... that's a lot of stairs