***Contains spoilers!***
With a basic plan floating nicely in the cloud, I dove into Storyline.
I had an idea of gameplay beginning on the beach – which is also suited to some cool activities – so that is where I started. My grand master plan was to build the beach slide as completely as possible with all the interactions that I could possibly need. Next step – duplicate the beach slide, change the background pictures and tweak the interactions… Wrap it up in some pretty graphics and game done!
Best laid plans and all that…
All in all, this is what needed to be included in the beach (and every other) slide:
- A freeform drag/drop interaction
- In the inventory, a hidden-state version of every object
- Off the side of the slide a normal-state version of every object so they are ready to be used on other slides later
- A true/false variable for each inventory item
- Triggers to check whether each item is in the inventory and to change its state to normal if so.
- Navigation – at this point hidden arrows which show up when hovered over.
- Objects on the slide to be picked up/used.
- Triggers for objects to go from the stage to the inventory.
- A narration layer for each object in the inventory – this could have been done with states but the control is much better with layers and I was super glad I used layers later on in development
- A character placeholder (the smiley face)
- Triggers and variables for when you use one object in the inventory with another object in the inventory. So far there are three ways you can do this and you need to be able to do it on any slide
- Link to lightbox slide for treasure map.
- Layers, triggers and variables for when you use the slingshot or rock with the environment. I have some ideas for “Easter eggs” on other slides
- Layers triggers and variables to use the shell with the character – again, hopefully some cool Easter eggs eventually.
- A special variable so that if you have thrown the rock, that it reappears on the beach and you can pick it up again. This so all is not lost when you use the rock in the wrong place
- An activity with even more triggers and variables – this is the main thing that will be different for each slide
- A trigger for dragged objects to restart the main timeline so that they snap back to their starting point
Phew! That’s a lot of stuff! All in all this one slide has 132 triggers and the project has 45 variables. I expect both of these numbers to increase as I add more features!
When I was happy I duplicated the slide and started work on the other locations.
Most of the activities are of varying levels of complexity using layers and variables but the following two are a bit different
Combo lock
This works using the “Dial” interaction. The player needs to spin the dial to enter a three number combination. There is a counter running in the background so when three numbers have been inputted, the interaction either prompts the user that they got it wrong or (if they got it right) the treasure chest opens. The counter resets to zero and the interaction restarts after three numbers are inputted.
Have a go – The correct combination is 639 (this is not the same code as in the game)
Statue
This interaction uses four “sliders” as the tumblers in the statue. Again, the idea is to get the correct combination of symbols. This was a LOT of fun to create – the custom images for the sliders took a bit of fiddling in photoshop.
I ran into a small hitch as Storyline has had an ongoing bug for the last 5 years where sometimes images randomly resize themselves on preview or publish. This isn’t ideal when you have carefully assembled an image (the statue itself!) out of slices to fit around the sliders. Luckily, Articulate finally got around to fixing this in the 20/08/2019 update. Life should be a lot less frustrating now.
Have a go – the correct code is:
Ready to test
After about 35 hours of work, I decided that the game was ready for testing.
My focus at the moment is playability and fixing bugs so I have just used placeholder graphics. It isn’t the prettiest at the moment but at least I will find out if it works!