How to Build Scenarios in Articulate Storyline

Synopsis

Articulate Storyline is a powerful tool for building scenarios. In this tutorial, I’ll show you the best practices for rapidly building scenarios using templates.

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Video Transcript

All right.  I’m excited to show you guys one of my favorite features in Storyline, and that’s how you can use character interactions and string them together to create a full scenario, or a full course, just based on a single scenario.  And when I have my set-up, I usually have all of my scenes over here on the left, and then I’ll have my characters that I want to be inserting with the pre-built states over here, scrub slides.

So I can just go and copy and paste them into the scenes.  Now you have a file that has both this – this scenario as well as two of the characters that you can play with.  And then I have just another bundle in here for later on in the lesson.

But let’s go ahead and get right into it.  If you have haven’t already watched the – the intro and working with templates screeners, you should go back and watch those because this lesson really builds on that.  So let’s go in here and let’s show you how easy it is to change up your scenario.

So if you’re working with PowerPoint and you have done any of this scenario building before in PowerPoint, one of the – the frustrating things is when you copy – when you copy the scenario a lot of the hyperlinks break and you have to go back and fix them.  That’s one of the really big advantages in production time savers in Storyline.

So let’s say this is my first scenario, I like it how it is, and now I want to go and change all of the information to create a second – a second scenario.  All I do is over here I click, and I do control D to duplicate.  Give it a second here to duplicate that.  There we go.  There is my scene number two.  And now I can just go in here and change this text box up.

Let’s just go ahead and enter some fake information.  And it doesn’t really matter what I’m doing but you get the point.  And then I would want to go in there and change all of the feedback.  I’m not going to do that just for time’s sake.  But you go back into each one of these layers, change that information, and you can do that for a third one as well.

So here I had, you know, the second scene I had random letters I put in here.  Let’s go ahead and duplicate that again.  And this time I’m going to use numbers.  So let’s just – I’ll just enter some numbers in here.  Just so you can see the difference when I go through to publish.

Now let’s go to actually do – do a publish and I’m going to pause it as it – as it publishes.  But I’m going to preview entire project.  Now this is the beauty of Storyline.  I didn’t have to go back and change any hyperlinks.  I probably would have wanted to rename them scenario one, two, and three.  I didn’t do that.  That’s okay.

So this is the first scenario.  You see based on choices, I’m getting custom feedback.  Now there is no button to try again so I would click the next button.  You’ll see that it has gone on to the next scenario.  Here’s where I had those letters put in.  And again, all the hyperlinking, you’re still staying within that second scenario.  The links all work.  It’s really a beautiful thing.

So we just move on to the next one, and there’s the one where I put the numbers in.  Right?  All the links are still working.  That’s really a great thing within Storyline.  So as you can see, you can really just duplicate these scenes, do as many of the scenarios as you want, string it together, and really quickly you have – you have a course.

Let’s say that on that second slide, actually wanted to change the characters.  So I go back to story view, and you’ll see my scrub slides I have all of these different characters.  So let’s go into the Corey scenario.  Let’s grab Corey instead of Ian, I can just copy him, go back to the scenario.  And before I delete him, I want to drop Corey in there, size him.

And the reason I do that is the – if I delete Ian all of those actions, or the triggers that I’ve built, will disappear.  So now I can just go in and change – so when that button is clicked and it’s changing…  Let’s see.  Let me go edit that, change the state of – instead of it being Ian now I’m going to select Corey.  And that – that’s going to angry.

So now if I were to preview this slide, you’ll see that when I click on this button the trigger moved from Ian to Corey.  If you don’t want to work with the triggers, and have actions working that way, you can also work within the slide layers, you can just insert a new image with a different expression on each of the feedback slides.

Hope you found that useful.  Thanks.

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