I'm actually saying we should go towards AGS now, that little blurb from Ol Sheep kinda cemented it.
Besides, look at 5 Days a Stranger, made by one person sure, but we can make something akin to MI3 if we do enough.

Sooo... my post backfired :wall: .

Well, the part about the graphical simplicity kinda made me think.
If we really manage to make some good sprites, we can make a great looking game.
Hell, we could even maybe make some voice acting over phone direct, but that's unlikely.
If a game made by one person can look like MI2, then if a couple of skilled graphic artists can get together, they can make a good looking game.

That's true but by deciding to go with AGS, you're killing a great opportunity to design a new kind of gameplay.

Sure, you can do a lot of crazy things with AGS' scripting language. Still, it'll never be as good as if you had a custom-tailored engine for your needs. Personnally, an old-school adventure game and a SNES-like RPG are two types of game I wouldn't consider making.

No point in working to create something that's already been [over]done better before.

But then again, I'm a programmer and I'm speaking from the point of view of a guy who enjoys coding in C++...

[edit]: A bit out-of-nowhere but I've always wanted to create a desert island survival sim. You know, with a character sheet to manage your health and a lot of interaction with the world (you could move stuff around to build a shelter, plant seeds to get food, hunt, etc).

I share OlSheep's view of AGS.
We don't have to make a 3D game. I know how much work can be involved just in having something show up on screen with only the most basic of interactions.
2D is also a lot of fun to play around with. And you can use 3D-modelled objects in a 2D engine as well. I know I'm repeating things here, but jumping on AGS because its easy to use, and to end up with a (sub-)mediocre product... it goes against the whole idea of making our own game.

If you're looking for free tools to make good looking and awesome games with, you're not going to get anywhere.
So if we want to keep it free, we've got to keep our limitations, otherwise our ideas will go beyond our possibilities.

Wrong. There are many free tools to make awesome games with. And some of us may have commercial tools as well. As a student of game design at university, I have access to the latest version of Maya, Visual Studio.NET, and others.

But back to free tools: there are not only free tools, but commercial tools that offer free trial downloads, which either have limited options (rare), or time limits (much more common).

To make any (technologically unambitious) game, all we really need is some talented graphics artists and a couple of talented programmers.
The artists we obviously have.
The programmers... we can't really tell until we decide on what we're going to use. Most engines use C++, which some of us have some experience with.

What I meant by my comment was GAME ENGINES, unless we make our own (incredibly difficult) we have no really good engines.

IrrLicht seems to be a great free engine. It has extensive documentation, it's C++, supports both 2D and 3D games, and is based on the Quake 3 engine (which is also open source now), making it extremely efficient.
The major downside is the lack of visual interface. Everything has to be hard-coded in .cpp files.

Sooner or later there'll be challenges to face. The idea is to find a way around them without limiting the quality of what you're producing. Don't aim too high, don't aim too low.