Weekly Challenge Submission: NA Oktoberfest Interactive Festival Game

 

https://360.articulate.com/review/content/8d023902-8305-4052-9e42-f0c12e40ae03/review 

Cross-posting this from this week's weekly challenge to share more broadly! Enjoy :) 

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Hi all! Excited to share my first challenge submission! I'm embarrassed to say that after almost two years at Articulate, although I've done a lot of little mini projects to test new features, I've never actually set out to complete a challenge before. After having a coffee chat with ​ this week and seeing one of his amazing Storyline builds, I got inspired to finally take a swing. I hope you all enjoy my build and am excited to hear what you would do to improve it!

The idea

I don't drink alcohol, but I do love to enjoy an NA beer, so I wanted to put together a virtual "NA Oktoberfest." I'm a nineties kid who grew up playing Neopets on my family PC, so I'm always inspired by interactive maps and decided to use that as the framing device for build. I decided to put together three stations that each had a different mini learning "game."

I wanted there to be an overall gamification to the entire experience, so I added a "snack plate" concept as a way for learners to collect three different pretzels as they completed each game. 

The tools I used

I used Storyline for this build. 

I built the visuals almost entirely from built in illustrations in the Storyline media library, but added a few separate images from Unsplash where needed (like the wooden wall background in the target game or the brewery background in the tasting tent). 

The entire thing runs off of a pretty basic branched scenario where the home "map" is a game selector and then each game has a different scene path. 

I used quite a bit of AI text to speech especially in the festival stage/audience participation game, and a good amount of additional audio and animations for emphasis and to make the whole thing feel more engaging. 

My target skill: states & variables

The big thing I wanted to achieve and master with this build was using states and variables to achieve the logic of earning pretzels on the snack plate as you progress through the games. I needed to find a way to make it so that the learner could earn one pretzel at a time in any order they wanted, and to do that I used variables and states. 

On the main slide, I added each of the three target pretzels with a default state of hidden. I added three global variables to the project so that each different game could be marked as "done" when the learner claimed each pretzel. 

At the end of each game, I made it so the learner would click to "collect" the pretzel (which I liked because it has a sort of video game quality to it of picking something up and adding it to your inventory). I set up a trigger on each pretzel that would set the state of the given game to done (from false to true). I also added a trigger on each pretzel claim moment that would bring the learner back to the map page. 

On the map page, I set each pretzel's state to change from default (hidden) to normal when the given variable changed to true. 

These triggers took some troubleshooting and tinkering to get right and I'm excited to have finished the project. 

There's a lot more I would have done if I had more time (fine tuning the visuals, adding more consistent audio throughout, making accessibility improvements, etc). I had an idea I didn't see to fruition where in the target game you "earn a dart" for each correct answer and then use the darts to play multiple times and each dart through is essentially operating off chance, but I didn't have time to puzzle that one out this time. 

Perfect is the enemy of done, so I wanted to share this with you all as it is! I hope you enjoy it and get inspired to try a new variety of NA beer!