About a week ago, I participated in a play test for my HFOSS group's game "Matter"(https://github.com/MrNex/Matter.py). Similar to the play test we conducted several weeks ago before Thanksgiving, we traveled again to Allendale Columbia school(http://allendalecolumbia.org/) and handed over our games to a class of 4th graders to try out.
This time, our game was more complete than our first play test. Unfortunately, when we tested all of the new changes on the XO, we found that the game lagged to the point that it was unplayable. This was most likely due to the addition of a transparent background being drawn over already existent dark backgrounds. To make sure that we had something at least playable, I reverted to one of our earlier copies of the game and quickly added the implementation of my score counter code.
Our game again involved a block of matter that the player could change the state of based on how quickly they moved the mouse. The matter would rise if the player moved the mouse quickly, and it would fall if they stopped moving the mouse. For this play test, we fixed some bugs that the 4th graders and ourselves caught last time, and as I said, I added code to keep score.
The students once again really seemed to enjoy our game which was really great. Another thing that was super awesome this time, was that 2 other groups also had playable prototypes for their projects. One of these 2 groups' games involved producing rectangles of certain perimeters and areas to "create pen's for puppies". The other game reminded me a bit of Pac-Man, and involved getting the player's character to only eat right angles. As you can probably tell, all of our games were meant to be educational.
The students noted a few things that they wanted to see changed. One student noticed that there was a bug where the block would get hooked on an obstacle randomly, which we have since fixed. Another student thought that the score did not count the first obstacle if you pass it, but we figured out that he must have got confused because we could not replicate the problem. Students thought our game reminded them of "Flappy Bird". Our game seemed to be quite addicting as students were all flocking around our laptops to try and get the high score. Amazingly, one kid actually got his score all the way up to 90!
I was very pleased with the feedback we got from this play test and it was a great feeling hearing a handful of students say that our game was their favorite. It was also nice to see again that so many students were interested in what we do and how we make games. A lot of the students also continued to say that they wanted to be programmers, which was pleasing to see at such a young age.
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