Reflections on: The wife who wasn't there

The wife who wasn't there was my first fully developed game about a husband who came home from work only to find that his wife was gone.

The game is a fairly traditional point and click adventure game made in the Adventure Game Studio engine by Chris Jones. The development time of this game was about 8 months on/off, starting with concept development and puzzle planning from september 2009 (although the story idea was from 2008), actual production (writing/scripting/drawing) from january 2010 and published on bigbluecup.com in late April 2010.

Positives:

• An experience and proof to myself that I could actually make a game. This game definately boosted my confidence as designer.
• General good feedback on the puzzles. This was something I was very worried about, since I didn't have a lot of confidence in my puzzle-designing skills, so it meant a great deal to me that players could figure out how to solve the puzzles and that they were logical and apparently also easy. However easy is not a bad thing in my book, as I think there is nothing worse than being stuck at a puzzle in an adventure game.
• Consistent artstyle. This is something I spent a lot of time on, making every single item, button and cursor look consistent, so I was rather happy it was acknowledged. It might not be the prettiest game, but it looks like it all comes from the same universe, and communicates my ideas and also the simplicity of the story.

Negatives:

• Lack of visual distinction between interactive vs. non-interactive objects. This partly comes down to the artstyle which doesn't differentiate between different kinds of objects but also because I didn't think of adding a rollover function on the objects. So the player would actually have to click objects to know whether an object can be interacted with or not.
• Some weak puzzles. Even though I did get good feedback on the puzzles, there were still some weak ones around. Such as "non-existent puzzles" puzzles which are basically not puzzles but rather something the player randomly stumbles upon and solves without any involvement except clicking on an object.
• Lack of direction. This was something I noticed when watching my cousins play as they didn't really understand what they were supposed to do when the game started. I believe this is due to a lack of information at the beginnning and the motive to play the game might not be clear enough in the game itself. (The motive being, that the husband has to remember what his wife told him yesterday)
• Room design was slightly icky. By this I mean that not all rooms had apparent exit/entrance ways, so players didn't always know if walking to the edge of the screen would lead to another room or to nowhere. This would probably be improved with some sort of visual clue, for example doors or carpets leading off the screen.

Overall I was/am satisfied with this game despite it's many flaws, it was a good learning experience and I have learned both to keep a consistent artstyle but also how to use the AGS engine, which makes me more prepped towards doing more adventure games. I've also gained quite a lot of confidence in my puzzle-designing skills and quite a lot of do's and dont's for the games I'm working on now and for the future.