I participated in a DIY Digital Games panel at Arisia today (for IF and graphical games both - the panelists were me, Caelyn Sandel, Adri, Brianna Wu, and Amanda Warner.)
To save the audience a lot of note-taking, I assembled a list of the resources we recommended. None of the IF-specific tools will be news on this forum, but some of the other resources may be of interest.
Adri specifically cited TADS 2 at the panel, which is why it’s there. I do have a TADS 3 link in the Parsercomp resource list elsewhere on the site: http://www.sibylmoon.com/parsercomp-2015/
I’m good with Inklewriter being mentioned in the comments, but I’d prefer not to add it to the main list. This list is intended primarily as a reference for the people who came to the panel and need links for the tools we talked about. (My late additions were tools that I discussed after the panel with various people.)
I was going to say that I could just link out to the IFwiki game engine list as a further resource list, but it looks like Inklewriter doesn’t have a page on ifwiki, which surprises me.
I made something a bit like that as those were the kind of adventures I loved and in the process learned a lot about making point ‘n’ clicks in GM:S. Can give some advice if needed.
My vote goes to AGS. I don’t know what it’s currently like, but when I left, a few years ago, it was the easiest, most powerful and versatile adventure game engine (and if you wanted to abuse it, well, check out Yahtzee’s platformers).
When the programming language got to be object-oriented it became scarier for newcomers. And although you can do basic stuff without programming, it’s so basic it’s hardly worth mentioning. The language itself is well documented, great autocomplete, it’s very easy to get help for a particular function… I recommend it. If you want to make graphical adventure games. It also allows for the inclusion of a parser, if you want to.
AGS: If you’re specifically trying to create a point-and-click adventure, AGS sounds like the right tool.
Construct 2: The visual interface makes this the easiest of the free graphical engines for a general-purpose game engine.
GameMaker: My favorite graphical engine for game jams is GameMaker, which combines an initial visual interface with decent scripting abilities. There aren’t many commercial quality games that have been produced in GameMaker, but there have been a few, most notably Spelunky.
Unity: Unity is absolutely the most powerful free engine, but it has the steepest learning curve. It generally requires you to know C#, Javascript, or Unityscript (Boo), but you can dodge around this with an external visual scripting system called Playmaker. I’ve heard some people speak very highly of Playmaker, but I haven’t personally tried it out.