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Theo has definitely mentioned the biggest difference in the workflow. During development, Gobby reads files directly from disk and our assets are referenced by their filename. This means that launching the game during development doesn't take noticeably longer than switching rooms in runtime. Also, we use virtual coordinates for everything which allows us to resample textures as we see fit as well as run the exact same room configurations on all screen sizes and devices.

We use a language called Angelscript (http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/) for game logic. So far we've had very good experiences with it and I'm quite impressed by how easy it usually is to map C/C++ functions and objects to the scripting language (I wholeheartedly recommend it). Though we do almost everything from Angelscript, we write anything that's performance sensitive in C/C++. Since we iteratively create the engine and implement our scripts in parallell, the "engine" as a whole isn't really feature complete in a general sense and is more of a framework specifically tailored to the needs of The Journey Down. For instance, the Gobby editor is far from having the kick-ass "save-game-to-exe" feature found in AGS and creating a game requires that native code is written and compiled which uses Gobby as a library. All platforms require some C/C++, Android requires some extra Java to wrap the native code and iOS requires some Objective C for setup.

As the person responsible for creating Gobby over at SkyGoblin, I can honestly say that, from what I can tell from what it is you're looking for in this thread, I doubt Gobby is it. It's not a generic tool for creating adventure games and we haven't really written it to in any way compete with AGS. I doubt it'll ever be possible to create a game in Gobby without a lot of knowledge in C/C++ and, depending on which platforms you intend to deploy on, some knowledge in Java, Android, iOS and Objective C. We're also a 2D engine and though it would take little time to add the rendering code to render 3D assets, we have no tools and no content pipeline for assembling them. As I'm sure most of us here already know, core engine technology's a very tiny piece of the puzzle when compared to the tools needed to assemble a game.

With that being said however, we're in no way precious about Gobby and I can't really see any reason not to share it at some point down the line. If someone else should have an easier time building a game of their own using our technology, that's a good thing and something we would very much like to encourage. At the moment we don't really have the time to package any of what we have into something coherent enough to be understandable for anyone outside of our office, but if there is serious interest in making use of what we have at a later time when we're not quite as bogged down in our own work and the code wouldn't just gather dust in a sad and lonely repository somewhere on the Internet, we'd gladly share what we have.

Hi everyone!

Just to present myself very briefly... I'm Markus, and I work with Theo, a guy some of you might have bumped in to here on the forum, on a game called The Journey Down at the company SkyGoblin.

We've had a need for custom resolutions in AGS (in our case 720p) and have just started work on adding support for this. We've also created a repository over at Gitorious from where you can check out the source and binaries for yourselves. At first, we thought of contributing to the Linux branch which is already being worked on over at Gitorious, but after inspecting it a bit we concluded that it wasn't really focused on getting to work on Windows, so based ours directly on the latest SVN version of the official version. We'll do our best to keep any changes easy to reintegrate (if they should turn out to be of use), but since we're still getting to know the code, we won't promise that nothing breaks. Anyone interested in pitching in, either in contributing or doing code reviews, is welcome to do so!

I've written a bit more about this on our development blog over att http://www.skygoblin.com. Either check that out for further information or go directly https://gitorious.org/skygoblinags/ to have a look at the project yourself. If we're doing something we shouldn't by publishing this, let us know!