How to prevent jumping from scene to scene without Restricting navigation in Storyline 360

In storyline 360, is there another way I can require learners to go through a course in a specific sequence without setting the navigation menu to restricted?

 

Our first deployment of this course had the navigation menu set to restricted. We are launching a new version of the course and were wondering if there is a more efficient way to have users navigate through the course content in the order specified below and not use the restricted menu setting?

I had a ‘convo’ with chat gpt about it & it ‘suggested’ using:

1. variables to track progress
2. triggers to update progress
3. and the triggers with layers to enforce the required sequence

I’m not strong with using variables, so I was immediately hesitant to embark on all the steps involved in getting those 3 things in place.

I thought I’d reach out here & see if there is a clean way to accomplish the same thing that restricting the menu navigation. The appearance of everything being locked when learners launch the course is a bit daunting, that’s why we are investigating other options.

This course has close to 1000 slides in the final version, the file I’m uploading has a lot of the files deleted with only the connection and transition slides in place since I’m guessing those are the slides that might need the updates.

I already have 90% of the slides set to disable or hide any buttons until the interaction is complete or timeline has ended for that slide. And the learner cannot click into other slides until they have completed that slide – they can go back to revisit a slide or section already completed at any time, but they cannot jump around to go through the content as they wish.

 

Thank you for any help anyone can provide!

Michelle