Good round up (as others have pointed out, missing AGS).
I think it is important to add that different engines have varying success in actually producing commercial games. AGS is famous exactly because it has produced many, many successful games, often by solo developers. It is being challenged because it is so very old.
This is sort of the way people will not try a JS web framework for a major project till others have worked out the kinks.
Those were really fun software packages, and at a time when just sitting at the computer creating and not consuming is what we did the most. [0] https://www.mobygames.com/game/klik-play
Fun!
Years ago I wrote a Zork-style game engine. It was scripted with objects and locations with attributes. You were also an object. Other simple scripts emitted messages and changed attributes when match conditions were satisfied.
Sounds like any other programming language when I say it like that. But the scripts created dependency trees which got triggered. So not a declamatory language with subroutines etc.
Nice, do you still have it? Possibly online somewhere?
The ScummVM-Wiki [1] recommends building fangames as text-adventures first, so all the characters, places and stories are defined before starting with graphics. They recommend Inform [2]
It was on an old 40Mb disk in a long-discontinued computer line. Actually I recently sent that computer to a guy who revives old hardware, and he got some stuff off of it! Maybe I'll ask him.
For Zork style (i.e. text) adventures it's well worth checking out http://inform7.com - yes, http, as unfortunately their cert is broken.
In summary you use a declarative English-like language, saying things like "The Library is a room" and "Inside the Library is a book". Inform's compiler takes those rules and builds a runnable text adventure using an engine based on the Infocom one that Zork was written with.
It comes with a syntax highlighting IDE, including a game player.
I grew up on Point and Click games. I'd love to see them make a resurgence. I tried using Adventure Game Studio a few years back after seeing some games made with it, but it wasn't intuitive enough for me to use it. I'll have to check this out.
* Wintermute Engine: http://dead-code.org/home/
* Escoria (for Godot): https://github.com/godot-escoria
* JavaScript Graphic Adventure Maker: https://kreezii.github.io/jsgam/