***Contains spoilers!***
So I decided to make an adventure game. The idea came about when I wanted to make something for my portfolio to demonstrate some of my skills in Articulate Storyline but I wanted to do something a little bit different and fun. Also, although I use Storyline every day, I feel like I have never really tested it to its limits so this would be a good chance to see what it can do. A game would let me use my imagination and hopefully do some out-of-the-box stuff.
My first step was to plan.
My experience with Storyline is that it can be very cumbersome to change your mind once you have something mostly developed. It reminds me a little bit of when I first learnt to code in BASIC but before I learned about subroutines and functions. Changing just one trigger which occurs on all your slides can be very time consuming and I had already predicted that I would have many triggers on each slide. It is important to get it as close as possible first time. Graphics and objects aren’t quite so critical as Storyline has a brand new feature “Media Library” which makes it possible to use easily-replaced placeholder pictures while I develop the meat of the course.
My initial plan was the typical scribble on the back of an envelope. I didn’t really have a story that I was burning to write but one of the games that I enjoyed back in the 90’s was “The Secret of Monkey Island” – a “point and click” style adventure game and reminiscent of the branching scenarios used in eLearning. I always wanted to write a game like Monkey Island when I was a kid but I never really had the skill or patience back then.
Every game needs a purpose and I decided on a rescue mission. I liked the idea of a game involving caves and secret lairs and treasure and bears so I (very) loosely linked together some locations and ideas for activities and drew a rough map.
With this vague starting point on paper, I jumped out of the bath, cried out “Eureka!” and transferred my ideas into a Google Doc. This document is very much alive and as the game evolves I update the document to keep track of activities, objects and locations.
***Spoiler Alert!*** Planning Document ***Spoiler Alert!***