Current Version: 2.1
ALPACA is the Actionscript LDU Point And Click Adventure game engine (LDU stands for Laser Dragon University, the animated web series for which I initially developed the engine). It lets you create 2D point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island or King's Quest without having to do much coding.
You'll need a copy of Adobe Flash. Once you have that, just download the source code, and either read the tutorials or the documentation to learn how to make games.
Yes. Free and open source to everyone.
You don't need to be an expert, but you should be at least familiar with it. Check out these tutorials if you want to learn how the basics of programming games in Actionscript. ALPACA takes care of a lot of the programming for you, but you'll still need to write code in order to set up puzzles and game events. In future releases I'm hoping to eliminate this need by providing a simple scripting system instead.
You don't have to make your games open source, and yes, you can make money off them. ALPACA is distributed under the MIT license. You can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
That depends on your skills and timeframe. The code is open source so you can alter it as much as you want, but if you're trying to to create a very different type of game, you might want to check out some other game engines, like Pushbutton or Stencyl. ALPACA is only really designed with point-and-click adventures in mind and retooling it might be more trouble than it's worth.
You'll probably need to change the code a bit to make this work. ALPACA was designed so that you can use Flash's UI to arrange scenes and give objects various properites. The idea was to keep actual coding to a minimum. But if you'd like to fork the project and make a Flex-friendly version, I'd be all for it!
You can, although for the moment you'll need to use the workaround I posted in this tutorial. Later versions of ALAPCA will make this much easier.
Flash is ailing, but it's not dead. For now it's still on nearly every Internet-connected computer (up to 99% by some estimates), it's a powerful platform for games, and it looks and functions the same in every browser. It's pretty much the best way to quickly build a game and put it in front of the largest possible audience. That said...
Not yet, but stay tuned. I'm currently working on a simple scripting system that will help move the engine away from its Flash-exclusive features. After that I'm thinking about rewriting the engine for Cocos2D, which runs in iOS but also has a Javascript implementation. Ideally you'll be able to take all your game scripts and plug them directly into the new engine without having to rewrite anything (you'll still have to export and reorganize your graphics and sound files, but I'll try my best to make that easy).
If you have any issues, check the comments on the ALPACA tutorial posts on my blog. If your issue isn't there, leave a new comment. That way the issue and solution will be visible to other users.
I'd love to! As long as your game is functional and doesn't contain any content that's going to get me arrested or something, I'd be happy to put up a gallery here. Just email me or tweet at me or what have you.
I'm Quinn, and I'm a designer and a developer. I created ALPACA largely for fun, and so far I'm the only one working on it, but I certainly welcome contributions to the code. Check out my main website or follow me on Twitter if you feel so inclined.