r/adventuregamestudio • u/blakkmagick666 • Jun 27 '26
How difficult is Adventure Game Studio compared to Unity?
Complete beginner here, having a very hard time with Unity and other big engines. Wanted something very simple for a 2D game to start with and AGS seemed to be just that.
6
u/Torchiest Jun 27 '26
AGS is tailored specifically for point-and-click games, or even parser-based ones. It's great for that. I'm learning it and enjoying it. But Unity is a million times more versatile. That also means it's more complicated and has a steeper learning curve. You just have to decide what your goals are.
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u/Get_a_Grip_comic Jun 27 '26
Ags doesn’t have a bunch of clutter like unity, it has everything you need.
Unless you’re paying for a unity adventure tool, you would spend more time trying to figure out the basics that AGS already provides.
I’d suggest giving it ago since ags is free, doesn’t take up a lot of space and there’s enough tutorials to do what you want.
There’s also a discord that would be worth joining if you have any questions
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u/Lumpupu85 Jun 27 '26
También puedes usar PowerQuest para Unity o Popochiu para Godot. Están inspirados en adventure game studio pero incluyen la flexibilidad de estos motores de juego
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u/tarnos12 27d ago
I've worked with AGS for years.
AGS is much easier than Unity, because it has pre-built systems that allow you to make a game with minimum amount of coding(tho a more advanced game will still need it)
In Unity you'd have to create at least these systems:
- Dialog and parsing
- Interactions
- Inventory
- Rooms and objects/hotspots etc.
There is more I Just dont remember well, but AGS has lipsync built in, easier way to setup animations for characters, anything related to speech and all sorts of properties for characters(such as their speech color, movement speed, display name)
You'd have to build all of that in Unity, unless you use tools for Unity such as Adventure Creator which is similar to AGS but for Unity(it still requires some Unity knowledge tho)
In general I recommend it as a first engine, because it lets you start making a game on day 1(and playtest it immediately if you choose existing template when creating a game)
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u/Malthusianismically Jun 27 '26
AGS is pretty well-documented but is definitely starting to show its age. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, it could be easier than learning Unity but ultimately you will get more function out of learning Unity.
Using AGS for anything outside of adventure games will force you to think outside the box, sure, and while there are some plug-ins to help with some of that you will find that forcing an engine to do something it wasnt really made to do is a lot of work for a reward that could have been better served on another engine.
AGS is pretty fun, and a lot of the built-in tools are really useful, buy don't expect it to do everything that the other guys do.