Looking back I kind of glossed over some of the “what is AGM?” stuff and jumped right into internals, so let me just give you a quick overview of what kind of games can be done with AGM.
Those of you who’ve had enough birthdays will remember the text adventures from Infocom like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Sierra games such as King’s Quest. With the former it was all text with typed in commands and with the latter you had graphics and point-and-click.
AGM is a hybrid between the two, although it lies closer to text adventures on the spectrum. But there’s no typing involved. Instead, you can see all objects and NPCs (non-player characters) that are in a room in a list and can select one and then click one of the action buttons, Hit, Use, Talk, Open, Close, etc.
You can include pictures of rooms, objects, and NPCs, and audio that can be triggered at certain times, but the main storyline is told via the text descriptions.
While there is some fighting in an AGM game, it’s very simple compared to a typical role-playing game (RPG). Some monsters you meet might be defeated with a certain weapon — if you have that weapon, you win. If not, you lose, and depending on the author’s wishes, you either die or get kicked back to the previous (monster-less) location.
I’ll put up a mock-up of a typical player soon — and the cool thing about an AGM story is that a player could be made for the iPhone, Mac or Windows, web, etc., and the stories will run in any of them.