A colleague recently asked me how to get started with Storyline. I pointed her to the Articulate community and tutorials that I had found to be a great resource for new users. A week later she came back and asked “What should I do now?”. I suggested that she try to build a simple tutorial, but she wanted something more challenging. I had just finished building a custom countdown timer for a Storyline project, so I said “Why don’t you build a clock”.
When I first started with Storyline, I had build a number of small projects to learn about the various functions and features. One of my early Storyline samples was a clock in two variations; one analogue with the clock’s hands ticking away and the other a digital clock, like you may see on a cellphone home screen. This may seem like a silly idea, but building a clock in Storyline involves using many features and functions that one would need for any elearning project, including:
- images
- triggers and variables
- And/OR conditions
- object states
- ‘Jump to’ navigation
- layers
- javascript
- reference to variables in text boxes… and many more!
Although I have never reused my clock in a real-world eLearning project, what I learned from building it now helps me in my daily development work.
Here is my finished example that shows the two clock variations, one analogue clock and one digital option. Note: the analogue clock could have used some more tweaking and troubleshooting to fix a few bugs, but it was ‘good enough’ for my early attempt at building a Storyline project.
For the analogue clock, I used a layered PhotoShop file. The clock’s hands are objects with custom states, which show the hands in various states of rotation.
A simple Javascript gets the hour, minute, second info into Storyline and triggers with conditions show the corresponding state of the hour, minute and second hands.
The digital clock is simpler, as it only uses references to Storyline variables in text boxes.
Edit 10/2016: Some users had asked about the source file for this project. You can download it here.