When comparing Adventure Game Studio vs Superpowers, the Slant community recommends Adventure Game Studio for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Adventure Game Studio is ranked 23rd while Superpowers is ranked 71st. The most important reason people chose Adventure Game Studio is:
Good for newbie game creators. Can be used for prototyping: on several occasions was used to make a demo/experimental version before creating a final commercial product on different engine.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy to learn tool
Good for newbie game creators. Can be used for prototyping: on several occasions was used to make a demo/experimental version before creating a final commercial product on different engine.
Pro Completely free and open source
AGS is licensed under Artistic License 2.0 and is completely free for use for creating both freeware and commercial games.
Pro Relatively well documented
Besides the manual there are multiple text and video tutorials and code samples written by community.
Pro Used for a number of high-profile commercial releases
Adventure Game Studio has been used to develop games such as "Resonance", "Blackwell" series, "Gemini Rue", "Primordia".
Pro Lots of assets available
An extensive library of game templates and script modules accumulated over years. You can construct a simple game in hours (if you know what you are doing).
Pro Friendly community
An old, big and active community which would support newcomers not only in learning basics of the engine, but can help with every aspect of game making (including art, voice acting, moral support, etc).
Pro Collaborative
You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time.
Pro Supports both 2D and 3D
This isn't a 3D with 2D on the side type of engine. The scene-editor supports both 3D and 2D views, allowing ease of use no matter what type of game your making.
Pro Plugin based
The community can develop and release their own plugins to add additional features making game development easier. All of these plugins can be easily downloaded in the app.
Pro Lots of handy built-in editors
It's got a scene-editor, cubic-model creator, text-editor, 2D image / animation importer, and a very useful tile-map editor.
Pro Easy to use programming language
Games can be published to the web with good performance, and the game-framework utilizes TypeScript to make programming games a little bit nicer.
Cons
Con Natively supports only 2D
2D only native support, 3D could be supported with plugins though.
Con Uses dated tech
Engine is based on the old technologies, which impose number of limitations and may cause problems on latest systems (level of annoyance varies depending on your priorities).
Con Graphics renderer is a bit dated
Graphics renderer is not well optimized for high-resolution games and complex effects.
Con No visual editor for scripts
You have to actually write all scripts yourself.
Con Development is slow
Further development of the engine is currently slow, done by only few people in their free time.
Con AGS Script isn't as full-featured as other scripting languages
Its own scripting language has lower syntax capabilities compared to modern script languages.
Con Assets cover almost exclusively adventure/quest genre
The features, script functions and game templates are very biased towards adventure/quest genre. The non-adventure games were made in AGS (2D shooters, platformers, turn-based strategies), but their development usually requires to write everything from scratch.
Con Workflow is closely coupled with the editor
Workflow is very tied to the editor and custom file formats, which can cause problems for bigger, more professional projects (interfering with source control, parallel development, automated builds, etc)
Con Not frequently updated
Although it's got very nice features as is, and the team does respond to issues at a pretty good rate, the engine itself takes a little while to get updates. It's a 3-4 person team, and they need to work jobs on the side in order to bring in income.
Even though the updates come out a little slower than other engines, the team is still very much committed to the project and still support it well.