Storyline Day 4 - Building Howl's Adventure

Intro

I really enjoyed creating this project and practicing how to effectively use the features of Storyline I'd previously learned.

(It helped a lot that the theme was Howl's Moving Castle, of course.)

In this sorting quiz, the user takes on the role of "Master" and can either choose their name or go by the default name of "Master Howl." The purpose of this quiz is to help the Master decide on a location to visit. There is a series of questions, with some branching involved, and for each answer the Master gives, a value is added to their score. At the end of the quiz, the door's dial turns to an appropriate location based on the Master's score.

You may like to test the project HERE. A brief video walkthrough (with sound) is below.

Howl's Adventure Walkthrough

Learnings

Aside from getting additional practice with triggers, conditions, and layers, I learned some new things about them, created multiple scenes, and introduced audio to a project for the first time.

An example of something new I learned about triggers happened during one of my many previews of the project. On the screen where the user enters their name, I hit the 'enter' key after typing my name out of habit. Nothing happened, as expected, but it made me wonder whether hitting 'enter' was a possible trigger I could set. It was! So I did.

I also learned that when we trigger a button on the base layer to hide when a user hovers over it and for another layer to be revealed at the same time, it is the revealed layer that the user must click to trigger the button. Therefore, a trigger must be created on that layer.

However, we must also create a trigger on the button on the base layer because users on mobile aren't able to hover and thus wouldn't see the new layer long enough to tap it. This was especially relevant to the first 2 questions the user answers in this quiz after the name slide (see mobile video below).

On mobile, tapping reveals the new layer at the same time as it triggers the button on the base layer.

Adding audio to this project was fairly intuitive, though I did need to consult the Storyline help documentation to ensure I was properly adding background music to the whole project, and that the background music would stop/mute while the Endings slide tracks were playing. It was helpful having an audio editor directly in Storyline so that I could shorten the length of the songs and add silence to the end of the dial spinning sound effect. The silence made it so that the background music that was applied to the entire project would stay muted between the dial sound effect and the slide track.

Howl's Adventure Story View

Challenges

There weren't any significant challenges during this project. The main issues were wrapping my head around the planning and remembering things I'd previously learned.

For example, for the first few slides, I needed to keep reminding myself that the "jump to slide when user clicks" trigger must always be the last in the list of "click" triggers for a given object to ensure all other "click" triggers execute since nothing gets triggered once you're no longer on the slide.

Final Thoughts

As is the case whenever learning a new skill, the most effective thing a learner can do is practice, practice, practice. I feel more confident in my fundamental Storyline skills and am now eager to learn more advanced features, like adding JavaScript to a project. The next post will be a bout a scenario-based eLearning project that I am building for warehouse employees. See you then!