November playtesting

You might think a 16-years-old wouldn’t have interest in School Rush anymore, this is not the case for A. She will ask me whether I have my DS with Bilou’s game almost every time we spend more than half an hour in the same room. So whenever I know I’ll be visiting her family, I try to speed up coding so I can have fresh play-testing feedback.

As you have guessed, it happened on the 1st of November, with the “game over” release candidate. She had to leave early, so I couldn’t gather the level completion times I hoped to have. But as she was playing, most of the kids in the house gathered around the sofa, and asked whether they could play the game too.

For most of them, it was their first time with the game, although I presume most of them had prior experience with a gamepad. They seemed to enjoy the game, did not show excessive frustration, and globally favoured the “float” power-up over the punch.

Interestingly, they intuitively named the inkers “the lifts”, meaning that they considered them as useful feature to beat the level rather than as some opponents (possibly because they’ve seen their elder using them in first place).

One of them even made it until the pencils-in-a-cave challenge of level 3 before asking for help… and then failing with the three-sponges-over-the-ink challenge.