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Building an Escoria community sounds like a good plan! :-) Looking forward to seeing what you're going to do with Godot/Escoria and I'll keep plodding away over here as well. Thanks for your kind words about Fhaloness!

Hi Pilchard, thanks for taking the time to write this reply!

I'll be honest, between work & a part-time Master's course, I haven't had loads of time to work on Fhaloness these past few months. I've used the summer break to really dive into Godot, after a lot of navel gazing. I've been using it intensely these past few weeks and am enjoying it more every day. Escoria, as a framework, can do quite a lot. And where it can't, Godot is there to shift to GDScript instead of ESC script. I've coded some graphic stuff that I never would've been able to do in AGS which has been really cool.

I went for a real tailspin in deciding what to focus on. C# or GDScript? Move back to AGS or dig into Godot? In the end I realised it came down to my own coding anxieties. Recently GDQuest have come out with an excellent tutorial on "coding from scratch" which includes a free open source GDScript learning tool. It's been a blast to work through that, watch some YouTube videos and in general, get more comfortable with Godot.

I'd say at this point, the only thing I miss, is the AGS community. The Escoria Discord is a very, very, very helpful & welcoming place, but the community is quite small and all tech support seems to come from the devs. Compare that with AGS (which is obviously much more mature in that sense) and you have a range of coding experts hanging around the forums. However, that being said, if you're looking to mix-and-mingle (as in, adventure game, but you want a day-night cycle, or a combat system, or anything not strictly "old school") then the flexibility to do so in Godot is enormous and well worth the effort.

So for me, I'm definitely sticking with Godot. Remaking Fhaloness in this way will take more time than I envisioned, but the modularity, proper version control, asset management, cross-platform ease, graphical prowess and modern UI (Godot is a dream to use)... I'm sold. But I will miss AGS!

Oh wow! It's so nice to read this & hear from a long-time fan. :-)

I'll be honest, you're correct - game development isn't particularly high on my list of priorities. But (no deadline set of course) keep an eye out for Fhaloness - Episode 1... a certain independent trader might just show up in there!

I figured I was never historically accurate with Amsterdam anyway, so moving Richard into that universe would be easy. And who knows, some day, we might see how things work out between him and Margareth...?

HE IS *NOT* OBSESSED, PEOPLE!

That's the plan! Now I just need to draw all animation sprites for these battles :-)

Hey Cryptic Hybrid, I left a message on your YouTube video as well, but thank you so much for doing this! I'm glad you liked this first sampler of the Erdien Chronicles. :-)

Hi Powerhoof, this tool, it looks really, really good!

I think to summarise my own situation:

My main issues with AGS are that it's Windows-only and I'm on a Mac. I also don't like how some of the "back-end" is quite dated with AGS. I'm most interested, for example, in using normalmaps & lighting scenes properly in 2D. I think (?) Unity will allow me to do this. So I can have candles/fireplaces/lamps cast real light and play with light effects. And full parallax support.

My main love for AGS (and why I keep coming back to it) is that it's soooo easy to script a game. So I can focus on the art, the dialog, the story, the puzzles.

I'm more, more, more than happy to pay for PowerQuest. But as a side-by-side with my loves & issues with AGS, how would you say PowerQuest compares? I have 0 programming skills, C# means nothing to me, and I prefer sticking with somewhat "basic" scripting. Which I think PowerQuest includes?