Escape Room

Thanks Gary. 

Outside of generating the ideas and the content, I probably spent 70% of the time in Storyline, and 30% on the graphics. With it being an internal demo I decided to use stock graphics to piece together the office scene and some of the incidental graphics that appear during the interaction. That was a big time-saver.

I really tried to lean in to making this accessible, so I spent a fair amount of time inserting alt tags and trying to get the focus order right. Where I would traditionally have used drag and drops I tried to create interactions that could be navigated with a keyboard too. There's a sequencing interaction in there that took quite a while to figure out but it's something I can see making its way in to client projects if it proves to be reliable. My attempts at accessibility won't be perfect, but hopefully they're a welcome start.

The 30 minute timer was created with JavaScript. I cheated and used ChatGPT to help with that. Saying that, there was still a lot of back and forth trying to get it to work correctly, so that still took a chunk of time to complete.

Frustratingly, one of the most time consuming parts was trying to find the cause of a bug. I was really happy with the animation that happens when you click between rooms but it all of a sudden stopped working properly. I had to back track and dig out the old files that are automatically saved in the temp folder to find the last working version. I then had to compare the broken version, with the temp version to look for differences. It turns out that the issue was being caused by the 'stop timer' button that you can see on this screen grab. Once the button was deleted, the animation started to work again!