Meet Benny: Adventures in Finding Furniture
PREMISE
Meet Benny: Adventures in Finding Furniture is a humor-based point-and-click adventure game I created in the Fall of 2008. Benny is a ghost who is depressed and cynical about life. Unfortunately for him, the rest of his world is about as calm as a three-ring circus, so when he comes home one day to find that all of his furniture has been stolen, the crazy misadventures are just beginning!
The game uses the Wintermute game engine and takes about one hour to complete.
MY ROLE & AUTHORIAL INTENT
I was the sole designer and developer of Meet Benny, covering all of the design, art, and programming (with some environmental art support). I had several purposes in mind when designing the game.
First, I wanted to create a point-and-click adventure similar in style to the old Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, both in game mechanics and use of humor. Mechanically, the game functions very similarly to those games, and while the humor I aimed for was more character driven than the situation-based comedy of the old games, I still feel I achieved both goals.
Second, I wanted to create a game with a “sketchbook” art style. I’m not much of a game artist, but it was a personal goal of mine to create a game with my own hand-drawn art. All of the game art was hand-drawn on paper with a mechanical pencil.
Third, I wanted to gain a stronger grasp of game scripting, which developing the game allowed me to do. Meet Benny: Adventures in Finding Furniture was a learning experience for me, and I enjoyed making it.