ATD Training Help

I attended a ATD course on e-learning a few days ago. We looked at a bunch of examples of interactive courses. As I'm new to Storyline 2 and elearning, I was hoping people might be able to suggest how to approach a few of the things I'd like to do after attending the course.

1) One of the courses involved a graph that went up or down depending on which answer you selected in a scenario. If you made a bad choice, the graph (and the character's facial features) worsened. If you made a good choice, the graph would go up. Is a graph like this best done with variables or by just having an individual slide with each possible facial/graph combination and setting up the branching like that?

2) The instructor told us about a challenge she'd seen issued to Tom Kuhlmann that he couldn't build a scenario in Storyline. It involved an office with lots of different people in different rooms. As you clicked on each person, you could 'overhear' parts of the people's conversation. You then had to select which person, based on their statement, was the biggest security threat and drag them into the supervisor's office. She showed us the actual challenge and how Tom responded and built the scenario, but I can't find the page when I search for it on the site or Google. Does anyone have that link?

3) Do you have suggestions for places to learn more about variables and conditions? I have already looked through the tutorials on this site. 

Many thanks for your help. I'm excited to start using Storyline 2.