Most of the projects I work on throughout the year are technical (aka ‘dry/no fun’) tutorials, with lost of software simulations, screen recordings and product demos. So, this year I decided to set aside some time and create a fun year-end Storyline project that I could share with clients, colleagues and friends.

With just a couple of hours to spare, I thought building an Advent calendar would be a nice little project. Here is some info on the history of Advent calendars. Growing up in Germany, I couldn’t wait to get up every morning in December, open another door on my Advent calendar and have a piece of chocolate. Of course, at some point I figured out that I could get to the chocolate from the back of the calendar and ate all 24 pieces on Dec.1. Ah, the memories…

Anyway back to the project, the setup was quite simple:

• a Javascript gets the current date
• based on the current day, ‘doors’ on the calendar are opened on the baselayer
• a Christmas-related Vimeo video is played for the current day on is own layer
• clicking on a door that is still closed will provide some feedback from Santa himself
• clicking on a door that is already open will replay the video for that day

And here is the setup for a sample day, with a video object, some text and a Close button.

Add a few triggers to call the right layer, insert some festive clipart, pictures or videos; and HoHoHo, you are done. Storyline makes it easy to build a fun project like that. Here is a special ‘Storyline Users’ variation of the finished Advent calendar . Enjoy and bookmark it for your daily dose of Holiday spirit!

Note: I’m going to leave this blog post and the calendar up beyond December 2013. So, if you come back here in July 2014, you can still pretend it’s close to Christmas!

Edit 11/2018: I dusted off the old calendar file, updated it with Storyline 360 and republished it here. I also tested the HTML 5 output on a rather old Samsung Galaxy S5 phone.

It worked quite well. For this version I added a video background from the Content library and used the Modern Player to publish.