Hi! I’m Elias Farhan, the lead designer and the only programmer in Team KwaKwa (http://team-kwakwa.com). Last year, we made a story-driven game “The Last Promise” that was well-received (the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?uid=32076) and for this one Ludum Dare, I wanted to have a big team to make even better.

So I selected two game designers who would help me with the design, three artists in Lyon who are studying in school Emile Cohl, one musician who worked with us on Cyber Punk Jam and one VO director and recording who is based in California (I don’t know exactly where) that can work with voice actors.
We managed to finish a little point and click: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=32076

To keep:

• The music and the voice recording came pretty quickly. On sunday morning, I had all the files, and I could directly work with it.
• I could more focus on the programming with my two game designers
• The FIXME hackerspace was a good location. The people were nice and it was great to know that other people were working on their own game and could explain it to each one and other.
• The game looks pretty nice and the majority of comments are positive.

To do better:

• Bugs, bugs everywhere. A point and click is really hard to make in such a short period of time and you never know if there is a bug with a certain interaction, except if you did test it. I didn’t think about lower resolution with the mouse position so there was a bug, because the mouse was limited on the bottom-right side of the screen for resolution lower than 1080p. Still, there are unknown bug on certain computer and I have no idea how to correct them.
• Game designers who don’t know the cost of implementation. The two game designers were focusing on the story, which was great, but in such a short period of time, the original story would have been impossible to implement. So, we had to cut a lot of interactions between the characters, even several who were already recorded by the voice actors.
• The art came pretty slowly. I worked on the mechanics on saturday, but for the level design I could have worked better if I already had some sketches.

The game:
I’m proud of this game. It was hard to finish it, but it was worth it. I like comments like: “I would love to see a complete game using this concept. The best rated so far for me.” It makes me feel like those 72 hours of hard work are worth it.
After, there are always the negative comments and you tend to focus on them, but the rating is not over and I hope there are gonna be more comments soon.

Elias Farhan (http://eliasfarhan.ch)