Game File: 

Putt Putt Saves The Stew.zip

So this is an adventure game designed entirely by my 4.5 year old son Eric.

He was playing a lot of Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo at the time. He started joking about Putt-Putt having to save other rhyming things (we do a lot of dumb punning), and we started talking about what Putt-Putt Saves The Stew would be like, and pretty soon we had agreed to set aside a big chunk of a Saturday actually making it.

I tried as much as possible to let him design everything without my input; my job was just to find out what his vision was and turn it into reality. We started by writing a little design document (spoilers!), where we hashed out what the central conflict was, and who the characters are, and what the puzzles would be.

Next we worked out the details of the geography of the game by drawing a map (spoilers!); I started drawing a few squares and linking them together, but pretty soon he got the idea and insisted on taking over.

Then we split up while he drew a bunch of art, and I started getting familiar with Adventure Game Studio.

Once I had a skeleton of the game in place, including scanning and putting in all of his artwork, we started to write and record dialogue. Basically, for all of the situations I could think of, I just asked him what he thought should happen, and I coded it up as we went.

Hints / Tidbits / Easter Eggs:
You can steal baby vegetables back from their parents by using the key on them. I thought this was a bug, Eric thought it was hilarious and made me keep it in.

There is only one ending, at his insistence. It is morbid.

Nobody has kidnapped the baby vegetables. There is no antagonist. They were just out walking and accidentally wandered into the cages and the doors locked behind them. Eric wanted to make it so that if you saved them, they would wander away, find their way back to the cages and get trapped again, but that was never implemented.

The thing that you start with in the inventory is your trusty dog Pep, who shows up in every Putt-Putt game and is mostly useless. Here he continues the tradition. There's only one thing you can do with him, on the first screen.

We recorded music, but it's not integrated into the game. Maybe I'll upload some, or we'll release a 1.1 with a title screen or something. Dunno. I get the feeling Eric's kind of tired of working on the game, and I don't want to push him if he's not enjoying the process.

EDIT: Mac port added.