2D Point and Click Engine Recommendations

Well, I use for my video game IJ: Fate of Atlantis Special Edition the Wintermute engine. Why? Its engine made for adventure games. It's free license. It support 2D backgrounds and 3D characters, realtime lighting/shadows etc.

It seems like every other 2d point and click engine designer loves LUA, lol..

When in doubt, use Unity. Its free to play around with, and (relatively, if you've got modest financial backing) cheap to license. Its very well documented, does 2D and 3D, is optimized for multiple platforms including mobile, and can use a variety of programming languages for scripting, like C# (also a Javascript variant, and some others I believe). I'm a complete programming novice and I could get some pretty interesting things out of it. Point & Click would be a snap if you're an old hand at the programming logic necessary like you are.

http://unity3d.com/

Hey!

I know lots of indie developers still use Adventure Game Studio - http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ - I guess it's not perfect but sill great games were developed using it, for example The Cat Lady - did you see it? - http://thecatlady.co.uk/

I would also recommend Adventure Game Studio - used to be a part of the AGS community for years, and there's a huge amount of brilliant games made with it(all of the Wadjet Eye ones, for example) in recent years.

You should look into Visionaire Studio.

I hear Visionare is quite nice. The guy making Statis is using it:
http://www.stasisgame.com/visionaire-engine-powering-stasis/

There is also Advendure Creator, a plugin for Unity, which has been extended to 2D. http://www.iceboxstudios.co.uk/adventure-creator

SLUDGE!
I used it a couple of years ago for a small hobby-type adventure game and was very pleased with it. In the meantime it has even been open-sourced, so all the better.
https://opensludge.github.io/

I used visionaire-studio.net for while and it look very good. Easy to use and the result is very good. It work on windows but there are working on a version for Mac.

I'm down for writing SCUMM 2015 SE with you Ron, but only for you. That's not creepy, is it?

Have you seen this?
Adventurezator: When Pigs Fly

http://store.steampowered.com/app/300280/

Never tried it myself, but seems quite interesting.

Some time ago I created Ignifuga (www.ignifuga.org) with the idea of making something like you propose, I'm not working on it anymore right now, as it's the usual thing to do in less popular open source projects (though you might like the name of the main singleton class ;) ).
I looked into EEPP (https://bitbucket.org/SpartanJ/eepp) and ORX (http://orx-project.org/) as alternatives along the lines of what I wanted to achieve (a 2.5D OpenGL/SDL/C core with Cython/Python or another sane language scriptability)

Another proud user of Unity 3D ( recomending it, with adventure creator plugin, the point & click game workflow is really streamlined. Also C#/unityscript syntax is afffordable and not so javascript-like as it would appear at first.

I've also tried Wintermute few years ago, great for 2D games, but lacks some robust scripting for me though.

I use unity3d and is the easiest to develop for plenty of platforms.

Have had good results (as a non-professional) with both Visionaire and Wintermute, highly recommend looking at both.

The Point & Click Development Kit (PaCDK) ... German engine. One of the best, I think, and I tried many. Very underrated.  --> http://adventure-creator.com/index_en.html

I don't have a suggestion but I'm really interested in what you think a good 2D point and click engine should include. And also what it should exclude (to reduce distractions or just help workflow).

Another vote for wintermute. It's opensource and runs on all main platforms, including mobiles (the 2D only fork of it called wintermute engine lite).

Adventure Game Studio and Visionaire are quite popular for point and click games. There's also Wintermute but it may be outdated. For more advanced features, Unity combined with the Fungus library - http://fungus.snozbot.com/ - could be quite powerful.

Maybe take a look at ScummVM's fangame FAQ?

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/HOWTO-Fangames

Basically, most engines referenced there were already mentioned in the comments:
- Wintermute
- AGS
- SLUDGE

Some people really like the SCI/AGI fangame creation tools for whatever reason ;)

I have been using Unity for 3 different adventure games now and it works really well. For The Adventurers of Bertram Fiddle, the game I am working on now, we are using the new 2D sprite system and it works really well. The 2D physics system has some bugs though, which means we have had to also use the 3D physics system in some cases. A nice aspect of Unity is that is it very easy to write your own extensions to the engine so you for example can have a custom timeline or sequencer which has enabled the animator on our team to set up puzzles on his own without having to script anything. We have a dev blog were all this is covered in greater detail:

http://www.bertramfiddle.com/dev-blog/

I wish I had known about Adventure Creator before we started out though, that could probably have helped us save a lot of time.

From an adventure game player and reviewer standpoint, Wintermute games are always awesome.

I have never played a Wintermute game that was not at least one step above the rest. From low res indie, or big shiny commercial product, at the very least the engine never stood in the way of crafting some amazing games.

If you're looking for engines with shipped,  complete games, then it seems Adventure Game Studio is the winner right now. Unfortunately,  it's clearly for old-school games, and thus only supports fixed screen resolutions at initial design.
There's a market for a refreshed engine, and there are some out there, but their lists of shipped games are much smaller.

It really depends on what you're looking for. AGS is really great for oldschool adventures and there are many plungins, modules, starterpacks avaliable to build on and it has a big community where you'll find help if any problems come up. If you want to make a low resolution game, AGS is good choice. But at the moment the limit for AGS is 1024x768, so Wintermute and Visionaire have some advantages when working with higher resolutions. As far as I know Daedalic Entertainment used Visionaire for some of their games, so you can look at "The Whispered World" or "Deponia" to get a feeling how Vis-Games look like.

Wintermute's scripting language is based on JavaScript, and like JavaScript, it is dynamically-typed.  All variables must be first declared with the "var" keyword, and type is determined by assignment.  You can write code quicker and with fewer lines, but may not be able to prove what something does until run-time.  Adopt a naming convention (Hungarian or whatever) and stick to it.  It can be a real source of frustration.  All things considered, I find it mostly a joy to work with.

In Wintermute, everything is an object (including variables).  The engine creates a Game object.  The Game object has an attribute called Scene (i.e. Game.Scene) that stores the currently-loaded Scene object.  Scenes are comprised of Actors, Entities, Items, Regions, etc. and UI objects like Windows and Buttons.  These are created using plain-text "definition" files.  Wintermute comes with tools that create these automatically for you, but it is possible to make templates/snippets in your favorite text editor and generate them that way.  To change the scene, you simply use the Game.ChangeScene method and pass it the location of one of your scene files (e.g. "../../scummbar.scene") and some other parameters like how the scene is supposed to fade in and out.  In Adventure Game Studio, the engine is wedded to the editor and is the only way to create new scenes and other objects.  You can't copy a folder to a new destination (e.g. cp -r room1 room2) and this is a huge limitation.  To my knowledge, it is impossible for developers to work on different scenes at the same time and merge their work.  One must save and close the project, and re-open it in another location.  In Wintermute, however, everything is stored openly in a directory structure and any work will immediately be accessible across a local network.  You can use git or whatever it is you prefer for source control.  It comes with a debugger that allows you to view all the global and script variables at run-time.  You can create watches, set breakpoints, step through code, etc.  In fact, it's the best debugger I've seen in an adventure game engine, but that's not saying much.  You attach scripts to the characters and items in your game, and code is executed when an event occurs.  There's a "this" keyword which stores the object currently running the script.  Dialog is created using nested if/else or switch/case statements.  For example, if the Storekeeper's TalkTo event is triggered, a function named StorekeeperDialog is called.  Inside the function body is an infinite loop that displays the dialog choices and waits for the user's input.  You store the selected response and process it.  Lastly, there's parallax scrolling, particle effects, plugins can be written in C/C++, and more.  Audio and video is license-free OGG and Theora.  All the graphical elements are sprites including the UI and fonts, but there is TrueType font support.  You can dump the string table for localization and talkies.

For hobbyists, AGS is a great way to learn how to make an adventure game, but I would not recommend using it outside of that scope.  Nevertheless, it's been used to make commercial games.  As for OpenSLUDGE, the language is poorly-designed, has poorly-chosen keywords and built-in function names, and the included tools and documentation are really lacking.  It's not object-oriented, but pretends to be.

I'm sad you don't like Lua.

Most Languages: Do it like this;

Lua: Whatever

are.. are you going to make an adventure game?

Make your own engine, providing a C# interface,
and use Unity3D just as a tool to make exporters for your
own game entities and scenes design and format :P

I used Wintermute, AGS and visionaire and MOAI.

Wintermute is the best for me but no recent updates.
Visionaire would be my second choice, i hate the fact that it is "too" commercial as an engine. AGS is more for Sierra games mentality. Do not use MOIA, seriously i will kick your butt if you do. Lost 8 months of my life with moia.

While AGS really is more the retro-engine I don't think that AGS is more for "Sierra games metality" as said before... You can create games that look exactly like old Sierra SCI games but you can also copy a Scumm Interface. I'm working with AGS and I prefer the old Scumm look of Monkey Island 2 oder Day of the Tentacle - and you can rebuild something like that perfectly with AGS. And I've also seen AGS Games using the "Coin Interface" used in FT or MI3. The template game uses a Sierra SCI lookalike interface but you can download lots of other templates to orientate on whatever retro-syle you like or create your own.

@Sofia: I am surprised that you say that about MOAI. Isn't that what they used for Broken Age? I haven't used it myself, but if Double Fine made a modern P&C adventure with it and successfully shipped it on multiple platforms, I would assume it's at least OK.

I lately used AlpacaEngine.com to make a game, which is programmed by one of my friends, an actionscript based point-and-click adventure game kit. You can even push it to Android and iOS with AIR. I made that game to send a resume to Double Fine, although I do not think that they liked it.

This is link of the game: http://game.hamdimortan.com/doublefine/

It took poor Sofia 8 months to realize Moai isn't an adventure game engine. ;-)

DF is using Moai and they haven't figured it out in 3 years. Maybe that is why BA is so late!

Aw, the adventure games engine I'm writing for my master degree thesis is written entirely in JavaScript + HTML5 + CSS3.
Sad to hear my main source of inspiration would not appreciate it :(

Hi guys,

Yeah, i kept working on MOIA because i thought "yes double fine uses it, they know something better".

But in fact Oliver franzke from Double fine has written TONS and TONS of code on top of MOIA, it is not MOIA anymore. In fact MOIA was more used as a good, let's say, starting C++ project template. There is no support for MOIA, its own community struggles with making sense of the very sparse and incomplete code releases.

Btw i think Ron you are looking for a thing that doesn't exist by definition. You say "modern" 2d point and click engines are disappointing in terms of their features. This is oxymoron. "Claimed" 2d point and click engines were to serve the creation of games that have that old, nostalgic feeling in terms of functionality,etc. Do not expect more from that.

Moreover, you COULD create a 2D classic point and click game in an engine like Flash, Unity, even  Unreal 4 and CryEngine (why not?) with tons of modern state-of-the-art features.
So the evaluation of "modern" 2d engines should not be limited to engines like AGS, Wintermute,etc.

I've played a few point and clicks which have been built with visionaire which seems nice: http://www.visionaire-studio.net/

Did anyone suggest Adventure Game Studio, yet?

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/

Know anyone at what's left of LucasArts? Maybe they'd license the tech used in the MI remakes to you.

LOL

Hey Ron.

Can you give an example of a complex (adventure only) task that you were able to do with SCUMM with just a line (or so) of code? I'm curious about that. Is it like letting characters walk around the scene or activating a built-in special effect?

Thanks for sharing. I consider this homework to make a good adventure game engine.

Could you elaborate on the multi-tasking?  Scripts in Wintermute can perform a task, sleep, and repeat.  It can be as simple as putting a Sleep(number_of_milliseconds); function into an infinite loop.  As long as the loop gives control back to the rest of the running scripts by sleeping, it won't hang your game.  For example, if you want a character to hiccup for the next 3 minutes every 20 seconds after drinking grog, then you can simply put a loop in one of the "global" scripts that counts down from 9 (i.e. 180/20) and sleeps every 20*1000 milliseconds.  Then set a global variable drankGrog back to false.

Sounds just like what you described at:  http://www.pagetable.com/?p=614

Even the code is similar except it uses dot notation found in OOP.  So instead of "actor sandy face-right" you have an Actor object named sandy with a Direction attribute that you can set.  e.g. sandy.Direction = DI_RIGHT;  It's the same thing written differently.  DI_RIGHT is just an enumeration that describes which sprite to display.

There is virtually zero boilerplate.  If you do a 9-verb interface, all your objects will have boilerplate by nature (i.e. programming unique responses to verbs), if you even want to call it that, but otherwise, nearly all of the scripting is describing what you see on the screen.

I cannot help but become overwhelmed with joy, hearing about Ron's latest inquiry.
What's also encouraging is seeing Disney give Grim Fandango to have Tim Schafer rework it.

It sounds like Ron has an engine to build...

I don't think there IS a state of the art in modern 2D point and clicks.

...Actually, I think Curse of Monkey Island is still "the best" 2D point and click, for a given value of best.  Just about everything after that has used 3D in some way.

I made a little authoring system & corresponding html5 runtime a couple years ago, specifically for first-person adventure games.  www.narrativ.io.  It solved the key issue lacking in my first engine from long ago - AGE (www.twilightsoftware.com/age - which was a lack of authoring environment.  In Narrativ you can just upload your scenes and wire them all together really quickly.  The latest version also supports uploading PSD files with lots of logic for showing/hiding layers and parallax scrolling.  The downside is that I only support true/false flags, and no complex logic or scripting, which means that more sophisticated puzzles are difficult to author.  Also, I haven't added back full motion video yet :)

Hi!

I am currently developing an open source engine an editor for classic adventure games:

Some features:

- Desktop(Win+Mac+Linus)/Android/IOS

- sprite/3d/skeletal(Spine) character integration in the 2d scene.

- The graphic editor lets you create the adventure with minimal custom script programming.

Some demo videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-wjMDTwk_w&list=UURFK2_qC6hEGcYA2Ngd6_dw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmPP7Vfy0Eg&list=UURFK2_qC6hEGcYA2Ngd6_dw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Ce60dYslk&list=UURFK2_qC6hEGcYA2Ngd6_dw

And here it is a little game developed for testing with an early version:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bladecoder.engine

The code:

https://github.com/bladecoder/bladecoder-adventure-engine

I hope you like it.

Why don't you use SCUMM? What's wrong with it? It is a specialized adventure game engine and you already know it. And SCUMMVM supports a lot of platforms.

Maybe he would like to write born again SCUMM :P

I would like to ask:
What's wrong with something like

guybrush.WalkTo(bananaTree);
guybrush.Wait();
guybrush.SayLine("Mmm, bananas...");
guybrush.FaceCamera();
guybrush.SayLine("Wish I had a banana-picker");

with all actions that internally fill an action queue like a stream or something like that?

I mean, can't you recreate your desired framework modules (e.g. your Entity Component system, your IoC container, integrate your favourite tween engine, etc. at a base layer, then you adventure games framework on top of it) using a general purpose language, and then program the game at higher level, using your own design?

In this way, when needed, you have the flexibility to add features that your framework didn't provide and directly use your modules at a lower layer.
I think these kind of exceptions would be hard to be managed by an application-specific language.

So, I just want to be clear here.

I am not looking for a 2D Point & Click engine. I already have a great engine that runs on iOS/Android/Mac/PC/Linux. It will do (just about) everything I'd need to make a adventure game or any other 2D game.

Using someone else's engine would drive me crazy, I'm way too much of a control freak and am constantly making engine changes to suit my needs. I also love to program and much of the fun of making a game comes from building low-level engine code and trying to optimize work flow. I enjoy that stuff.

The genesis of my original question was just to see what is out there and what others are doing and liking.  Everyone's feedback has been super useful! Thanks much!

Just a cool approach i'm working on: i'm both game and web/db developer. And because there's a lot of db and structure involved with a 2d point and click, i've developed a CMS for data management part of my engine. Benefits: easy to use, anyone could log in and edit with just a browser (dialog editor?), i can attach it to any 2d graphic engine.

Now focussing on making it work in Unity. Ultimate goal is to control game at runtime via event manager, via CMS. Of course if this works i'll share all tools to whoever's interested.

No engine i've seen yet does it all right, you need to make compromises everywhere. Naybe DF's engine is the most interesting one out there right now. Therefore, if you have the resources to, write your own one instead. But you knew that already...

I reccomend you use the AGS Engine: http://adventuregamestudio.co.uk I have been using it for almost 3 years.

Well the big three engines have been mentioned

Visionaire
Adventure Game Studio (AGS)
Wintermute

All of those are great engines. Visionaire is probably the best to use for a commercial game as it is now cross platform, well supported and is used by Daedalic Entertainment (a big adveture game studio in Germany). AGS is a good second, the code base is open source and community supported. Also lots of commercial indie games made with it. Wintermute is also good but still Windows only.

The plug-in for Unity called Aventure Creator (mentioned previously - http://www.iceboxstudios.co.uk/adventure-creator) also looks promising. Unity3D is used by tons of developers, is highly supported and cross platform.

The Engine is not public, and the games are not true Point and click, but they are close, are the Ace Attorney series on GBA/Nintendo(3)DS

There are a few people that try to understand the scripting used for these games and it is quite interesting, and I think with a few changes could be easyly updated to a more classical P&C game. Two itteration of this licences are more close are the "Gyakuten Kenji" aka "Miles Edgeworth Investigation"

Here are some fan made tools to generates working scripts:

http://www.court-records.net/casemakers.htm

What I'm doing and liking:
- not hardcoding resolution. So all graphic positioning is represented in floating point..
- easy regeneration of graphics. Using a 3d editor for each scene, with external references to all reused people\geometry. eg So you can change the way a town looks, and all the scenes that contain that town in the foreground or background, get regenerated.
- loosely coupling graphics to code. This way in the future you can change the amount of images in an animation, and your scripts will play the animation with same timing, but more frames.
- Do timing of animations in the gamescript.
- Declarative gamescript. This makes your scripts focus on what you want the character to do. And leave the engine (now or the future) to figure out the how.
- XML gamescript. This makes future porting, or rearchitecting, just a case of writing an XSLT.
- If you have a good editor, XML also means you can give your editor a schema, and it will give you intellisense for all the commands\elements  at your disposal.
- Using XML selectors for object-verb interactions so that your xml editor will detect things such as doubling up of an object-verb handler in a script.
- All script commands done as animations, so they have a temporal dimension if needed for sequentialization or parallization, and they all have a similar interface eg run\cancel\onComplete\onUpdate.
- have a very simple object model that the animations act on (eg scene is list of objects\ object is list of animations\animation is list of images)
- Unit test all animations, passing in the simple 'mock' object model, and test that the animation modifies the scene in the expected way, when its done - and sometimes when its running.
- Use C64 themes for all your editors, so you get that good simple feeling like in the old days :)

To me the current state of the art (visual art & animation) in 2D adventure games is Machinarium. It has plenty of subtle animation, which I find sorely lacking or of poor quality in much of 2D games.

To answer this question properly, you'd have to conduct interview with Amanita Design on what strengths and issues they found in using Flash to make their games (Samorost 1-3, Botanicula, Machinarium). That would be interesting read as I don't think I've seen one that digs in how much help or hindrance using Flash really is.

Im currently using Visionaire - and I can honestly say that it is THE BEST 2D Adventure Game engine on the market.

Its easy to use, hard to master. You can get a room set up in the engine with a working inventory and character in less than an hour (from knowing nothing about it), but you can get into EXTREMELY complex puzzles and interactions very quickly.

Its very artist friendly as well, and works well in team projects.

AND its being actively developed - something that really just isn't happening with the other AG specific engines.

Im using it on my game ( www.stasisgame.com ) - but when you look at the different types of games that are being made you can see how insanely versatile it is.

Hi

I admit that I didnt read all the coments nor do I know if this website is even active anymore, but...
Is it possible to get a high res version of that image anywhere?

The only reason you'd use one of the multiplatform engines like Unity or Unreal would be if you didn't have a multiplatform engine already, or particularly wanted a decent 3D pipeline and didn't want to take the time to write your own. I don't see Unity, or similar, as the be all and end all of multiplatform because with each version it seems to break some portion of the code you were relying on previously. So I would expect it would be a pain to recompile the game in 5 years time if I want to make some minor changes.

AGS and Wintermute are both very mature for 2D point and click engines, but lack the deep multiplatform support, especially for touch devices. Visionaire was nice, but I remember there was some platform drawbacks. The big problem to be solved, I find, is the sprite-system, especially sprite packing, for mobile devices, if you want to support high resolutions, while also being able to run on lower resolution devices. And because of Android fragmentation, if you want to support that platform you have to consider that resolution soup from the beginning, at design time.

I still think Lua is pretty good, but a hassle if you have to compile it for multiple platforms, and you have to be carful how it performs on mobile, if it's consistent between desktop and mobile. I find C# really good as a scripting and programming language, but multiplatform is not straight forward, though Unity seems to have solved this, but I don't think it's straight forward. C++ is obviously king for multiplatform.

Honestly, no-one has really solved it definitively for 2D point and click and multiplatform (especially for touch). And there's not a lucrative market for it so your best course of action, which I'm sure you've no-doubt surmised, is to roll your own solution.

DoubleFine mentioned they were going to release their engine, built on Moai, when it released, but I think they did so much work on it that it's too closely tied with their proprietary tools to be any good to anyone.

Hi Ron, I'm the Han Solo Adventures guy. I'm currently using a new alpha build of Adventure Game Studio for my current game Jack Houston and the Necronauts, which supports 1920x1080 HD graphics and it's working beautifully. I've looked into a few other engines, including trying to create an adventure engine within Unity, and I have frankly run back to AGS screaming every time. The years of effort put into AGS is astounding, providing really well rounded tools for every aspect of the adventure game from inventory to dialogs to an animation system fit for 4 or 8 direction movement, support for any menu interface you can think of, and easy to customize with a powerful but simple C-like language. With HD now, it would take a lot to pull it out of my hands.

I suppose it's a bit out there, but there's this open source engine called Godot that supports both 2D and 3D. The documentation isn't great, but it's a powerful engine. It won't have the benefit of being tailor made for adventure games, but you have the option to try and i suppose script those features in.

This is if Unity doesn't appeal to you, which was used for Kentucky Route Zero for example. There's a plugin/toolkit for Unity called Adventure Creator which you could check out as a timesaver: http://www.adventurecreator.org/ I don't know how widespread it is nor have I used it yet.

Hi Ron,

it's a bit off topic, but, talking about scripting languages,
nowadays you could get much fun implementing your own
interpreted/compiled optimized language with LLVM (http://gnuu.org/2009/09/18/writing-your-own-toy-compiler/ http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/LangImpl1.html).

I use adventure creator for unity along with dialogue system and chat mapper
The combination of these is totally epic

Hi Ron,

Andrew Plotkin wrote an interesting article / presentation about rules based programming and the Inform 7 toolkit for writing text adventures:

http://eblong.com/zarf/essays/rule-based-if/

I realise that theres not a 1:1 mapping between the problems in text and point & click adventures, but it does share some commonality – more than a generic 'game engine' might – and the survey of different programming paradigms is interesting.

good luck with the kickstarter

Steve Havelka has this tool that looks really nice: http://ariesengine.com

I know I got late here, but I just want to mention that Godot Engine (http://www.godotengine.org/wp/) will open source it's graphic adventure module soon. I haven't try it out, since it wasn't released to the public. But I tried the engine without said module and I can say it is a great, simple, no nonsense, extendable, general purpose game engine. So my gut tells me their graphic adventure module will be just as great.

Just adding my grain of something so you know.
I've created our own graphics adventure engine at my job, running on Flash and using XML files generated by a tool created by our Game Designer. It pretty much solves all needs when creating a Graphic Adventure and supports most classic features with a nice interface for developing the adventure itself. It could even run on other platforms if the XMLs are interpreted correctly.

Here are some games we created with it, the engine itself got upgraded from one game to the other as seen in the improved game quality:

http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/ben10/the-mystery-of-the-mayan-sword/index.html

http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/ben10/the-alien-device/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx_DbSW_zN4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo3DGx52PyY

http://thecell.tv/games/season-2

http://thecell.tv/games/season-1



Regards,
Rodrigo Vieytes


PS: love your game, don't ever leave this world please.

Just wanted to say-the newest AGS version supports custom resolutions. (not sure its the official version on the main download page but its available at the forums in the ags editor development section )

Hi Ron, I don't have answers for your question but I do have a question of my own. I'm an animator and thanks to an old dusty physics degree, I also have some rudimentary coding skills. I've always wanted to be able to make a point-and-click game like my favourites made by you and your contemporaries, but I don't really know where to start. Any chance you could offer any tips?

I only started to make a point-and-click game in Flash, and more recently I started looking at Unity. But I keep having a deep desire to build an engine from scratch. The stumbling block I come across, having only made scientific programs really, is where to start with graphics.

Anyway, I'll end my ramble there. Any help you could offer would be appreciated. Can't wait for Thimbleweed Park!

I suggest getting the free Unity3d engine.  If you don't want to create the point-and-click mechanics yourself you can buy the adventure creator for $70 (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11896)

Honestly, creating the mechanics wouldn't be too difficult.  I might be doing it myself here shortly.

On another note, I love this C64 theme for your blog.  I think I might rip it off for mine... :)

I love maxmediapro; google it, easiest way to make a game ever

Hi Ron,

First of all let me thank you for all these wonderful childhood times with your great creations; you are an inspiration for us all! (Yes, till today :P )

Perhaps you'd like to check http://crusader12.com/C12Jaguar/

A SCUMM-like engine for online adventures on HTML5 , it is simply great.

Cheers from Greece!
Chris