Curious about making games a part of your solutions in a meaningful way? Why not make something unique, engaging, custom-designed, and truly game-based? Point-and-click games, in which choices, puzzles, and discovery lead to memorable learning experiences, are remarkably simple to build using eLearning authoring tools. You may not think of yourself as a game designer, but you probably already create engaging scenarios in which the objective (win-state) is for the learner (player) to come away with usable knowledge (rescue the princess). And building the additional skills you’ll need for crafting these games, such as customizing art, adding interactions, and planning a learner adventure, is not as tricky as it might seem.

In this session you'll learn more about how educational point-and-click games can play a part in your work, and how to develop your own in Articulate Storyline. You’ll find out how to leverage the nuts and bolts needed to build the experience: layers, states, variables, triggers, and hotspots. You’ll explore fundamental game mechanics, like choice-branching, quick-time events, and simple puzzles, and how to plan these intermittently throughout the adventure. And finally, you'll look at the five steps you can use to make planning the underlying narrative of your game easier and more efficient.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why point-and-click games can be effective, customizable, and memorable eLearning experiences
• How to develop a point-and-click learning game using Articulate Storyline
• How to plan the story, scenes, and various interactions of your game to best suit the learning content (and common pitfalls to avoid)
• How leveraging game mechanics and game psychology builds engagement, and what that means for constructing gamified learning
• How to find, customize, and insert open-source art, music, sound effects, and other elements to dramatically elevate your game

Audience:

Designers, developers, game enthusiasts

Technology discussed:

Articulate Storyline, Adobe Photoshop, ThingLink