In this project I took the roles of game designer, producer and programmer, in a team of 3 - KiwiKiwiTeam.

It was our team's first big project, and we were able to learn a lot from it.

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As the game designer and producer, I wanted to create a game that could teach its players about the Portuguese dictatorship, and how hard it was to live in these times. My goal was to have at least one section of the game, where the player would feel morally challanged, and think about the consequences of their choice.

I'm happy to say that, according to the testing phase of the project, we were able to achieve this goal!

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Another goal I had, was to correctly balance the game. There are losing and winning scenarios, the player improves with experience and the game increases its difficulty over time! After conducting 3 testing sessions with dozens of players, we were able to almost fine tune the balancing (still a lot to learn!).

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Due to unexpected problems during the pre-production, I had to take the programming lead for the rest of the project, while the original programmer produced the music.

This put the team on a very hard situation, as the workload was heavily unbalanced. Fortunately, we had already predicted the possibility of this risk, and we were able to cut the scope of the project. 

Although still on a very tight schedule, my main priority now was to preserve the mental health of everyone and publish "Faina" without entering crunch mode.

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On the other side, this came to us as a lesson in critical thinking and adaptability. Having more than just a plan A is crucial for the creation of any project.

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We were proud of what we were able to achieve as we got very positive feedback from players and advisors.

This game taught me the that planning risks, creating workflow protocols and defining base rules and deadlines are essential before even starting a project.