At my usual budget (side projects on own time) with no artists I mostly just tinker with dialog trees in Twine or Twine-like languages. (I've got my own finished YAML-based Twine-like and my own unfinished Inform-inspired Twine-like that maybe one day I'll push closer to completion.)
Given a small budget, I feel like you can go a long way with Löve 2D or Ren'Py. (Both were "compile" targets of my YAML-based Twine-like at various points. Which I mixed with some awful programmer art.) Ren'Py especially has a lot of the tools you need to do off-the-shelf Point-and-Click adventures well for a great price and relatively easy learning curve with a ton of examples and tutorials out there to learn. I think Ren'Py's focus on "Visual Novels" tends to get it overlooked for "point-and-click adventures", but even as "just" a prototyping tool on the way to a "proper Western viewpoint point-and-click" it shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.
Given a larger budget and a general desire to use off the shelf tools where I can I'd probably start with Unity as a base today. It has most platforms covered and I like C# as a language and a growing body of "indie" artists have good experience with it on their CVs. I haven't investigated the existing adventure game packages for Unity, but I've heard good things. I've also heard good things about Inkle's Twine-like engine for Unity.
I'm also sort of watching Unreal Engine 5 as a weird dark horse here given enough budget, and that might be a big budget. Some of the stuff that Unreal Engine 5 is doing wouldn't be directly useful in a "point-and-click" in the traditional sense, but has me curious if there's room to explore things like a modern take on the GRIMe engine with off-the-shelf tools. (GRIMe being Grim Fandango's engine for an attempt at 3D adventure gaming.)
Thanks for the in depth response! I mainly toy around with Twine (interactive fiction) but have been wanting to branch off and learn some game creation. I have Unity w/ Adventure Creator and RPG Maker 4. I'm not an artist by any means so being able to import assets like with the Unity marketplace is great.
I've been looking for something that would be akin to Wadjet Eye making games- I' assuming they have an entire template they use and mostly replace art assets although I could be completely wrong. Some of them have very different Stat/etc systems.
Anyway, I just want something fun to dabble on that won't frustrate me too much. I'm familiar with Renpy and have done some work with it but like you mentioned I've overlooked Visual Novels for P&Cs. I guess I could do the conversations/story in twine/renpy and worry about the mechanics of moving around/interacting with a world down the line.
I only know Golang and some python, so the c# for unity was intimidating. I was really hoping to find a decent go game engine but I haven't found anything relative. There is a golang game engine I forget its name.
Godot isn't quite as ready for off-the-shelf usage in a high end game, mostly because of rendering performance. The architecture isn't performance-centric since the core team is focused on features and UX. It's fixable - everything is when the source is available - just a question of whether your project can justify the trade-offs and investment involved. To match what Unreal is doing right now essentially means writing a software renderer that executes on the GPU, along with various layers of streaming and caching to prepare assets for this pipeline; right now Godot is still aiming for lower-hanging fruit.
But since Godot is getting some serious backing these days, give it a few more years and it'll probably be a juggernaut in the space like Blender.
Looking at the teaser video, Godot (or any other generic engine) wouldn't really struggle with this. It's like few hundred sprites with light scene hierarchy. What Unreal is doing right now is insanely-detailed 3D geometry and lightning, which is aimed at film industry and AAA 3D action games.
I wouldn't use AGS either because its animation is frame-based, and this latest Ron's game seems to use skeletal animation heavily.
More important than the engine is the rest asset pipeline. A crucial part is the tool to author all the skeletal animation sequences. Some engine editors have this built in, and there are dedicated tools like Spine and Spriter. They already supply some 'runtimes' to play out animations in many different engines. Looking at supported engines (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes) should help with choosing one.
I've only skimmed Godot's documentation. I think at least in a few respects, I'm still waiting for Godot. (I cannot avoid the literary pun that they created for themselves in their naming, I'm sorry.) One of those respects that is particularly relevant here is in "point-and-click adventure"-specific tooling. To my understanding all of the packages for doing "point-and-click adventures" on Godot are still much more nascent/under-developed to their Unity counterparts. But again, I've not been keeping up with Godot that well. In part, because, as I admitted I like C# (even as [ab]used by Unity), Unity seems good enough, and Unity has a lot of experience under its belt that Godot doesn't have yet.
At my usual budget (side projects on own time) with no artists I mostly just tinker with dialog trees in Twine or Twine-like languages. (I've got my own finished YAML-based Twine-like and my own unfinished Inform-inspired Twine-like that maybe one day I'll push closer to completion.)
Given a small budget, I feel like you can go a long way with Löve 2D or Ren'Py. (Both were "compile" targets of my YAML-based Twine-like at various points. Which I mixed with some awful programmer art.) Ren'Py especially has a lot of the tools you need to do off-the-shelf Point-and-Click adventures well for a great price and relatively easy learning curve with a ton of examples and tutorials out there to learn. I think Ren'Py's focus on "Visual Novels" tends to get it overlooked for "point-and-click adventures", but even as "just" a prototyping tool on the way to a "proper Western viewpoint point-and-click" it shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.
Given a larger budget and a general desire to use off the shelf tools where I can I'd probably start with Unity as a base today. It has most platforms covered and I like C# as a language and a growing body of "indie" artists have good experience with it on their CVs. I haven't investigated the existing adventure game packages for Unity, but I've heard good things. I've also heard good things about Inkle's Twine-like engine for Unity.
I'm also sort of watching Unreal Engine 5 as a weird dark horse here given enough budget, and that might be a big budget. Some of the stuff that Unreal Engine 5 is doing wouldn't be directly useful in a "point-and-click" in the traditional sense, but has me curious if there's room to explore things like a modern take on the GRIMe engine with off-the-shelf tools. (GRIMe being Grim Fandango's engine for an attempt at 3D adventure gaming.)