Bilou School Rush

Bilou: School Rush is a short speed platformer for the NDS

You play as Bilou, an alien blue ball lost into a giant school. Citizens of that school believe he is the hero sent to solve the raging battle between Math and Philo right at the time where Math pendats have opened the ink gates in a teacherous attempt to flood the Philo library.

This is an NDS homebrew made with an original and open-source game engine waiting for you to master it and write your name in the book of True Heroes.

How to play

The best experience will be to play the game on a physical device using the appropriate nds linker. unzip the .nds file out of the package and copy it anywhere on your microSD card, then insert the card back in the linker and the linker into the NDS. With old linkers, the console might stop on a black screen with text while loading the game; just press A to proceed with SD card scanning and loading will resume. 

Alternatively, you can play the game on any NDS emulator, such as desmume or MelonDS. The game does not require touch screen for gameplay.

Once in the game, do not let yourself fooled into thinking that everything that moves is a monster. The fact that their blade or ink hurts you don't mean they can't be helpful.

Difficulty Settings

Remember where arcade/micro games would bring you back to level 1 with increased speed once you reached the last level ? Well, School Rush features something like that: if you complete the 4 levels, the credits level will bring you back to level 1 but the ink will now raise faster. 

Will you be able to find how to reach the end when the ground has been flooded ? Will you be able to run fast enough ? 

You can use the "normal" and "hard" difficulty settings to play with rising ink directly, but you can also pick "easy" to casually explore the game with the ink staying at the bottom of the level. But don't expect to find the secret good ending in easy mode ;-)

Feel free to post your best score on my blog

How short ?

School Rush is short by the number of levels it features: 4. Each level could be beaten with 1-2 minutes with the exception of the secret level. It offers you 3 lives to complete the adventure, which allows kids to share one device, each playing usually 5-10 minutes before handing the device to their friend.

But if you try to beat the fastest time, expect trials and errors to find which route works best and hours of practice to do it reliably ;) This game is my love letter to the speedrunning community ;-)

Credits

Art & dev by PypeBros (me)

Original idea and characters design by Piek H

Sound engine based on libntxm by 0xtob

Music by Cyborg Jeff

Controls

The basic Bilou moves are available anytime

Move left or right	DPAD
Jump	A or Y (hold to jump higher)
Catch/Throw	B or X
Run	Hold R or double-press DPAD

Additional power-ups let you use the following moves

Big Punch	Defeat baddies with your bare fist	double-B
Floating point	Briefly float or hover	hold A after jumping