On Thursday, we returned to the Children’s School for our final playtest of the semester. Our focus for this playtest was to test our introduction and our new mini-game instructions. We tested with seven kids–4 boys and 3 girls–all about 5 years old. After showing each child the intro, we asked him or her to describe what he or she saw so we could test it for comprehensibility. We discovered that the crash land sequence goes a little fast, so we rendered that part to go less abruptly and we added a close-up of the alien and his spaceship to reinforce the nature of the problem.
The mini-game instructions worked well, with the only weakness being that the bouncing arrows seemed interactive and made the kids want to click those rather than the towers. We decided that there was no reason why the game couldn’t allow a click on either the tower itself or on the arrow above it, since either indicates the same choice of a tower.