You’ve come up with a game design and are ready to put it into action! This article will give a high level overview of the more commonly used game mechanics and how your design can be implemented on the Narrivate platform.
Looking for ideas on how to design your game? Check out the first article in this series, Designing a Serious Game.
Game Resources
All game economy elements and most of the game mechanics are created and configured as what we call ‘resources’. These resources can have input requirements, i.e. costs for acquisition, either consumed or not, and they usually have images associated with them.
You create resources of different types, configure them and add images, video, descriptions, as well as dependencies/interactions with other resources. Then these resources can be rewarded from quests, training or factories, and they can be used for or spent on more training, completing other quests, purchasing items from the shop, buying more information to inform case decisions, etc.
Levels & XP
The classic game mechanic for measuring progression is experience points (XP) and levels. Players start on level 1 and are rewarded XP as they complete training and quests. You configure how much XP is awarded from each training material and quest, but what is rewarded is always entirely up to you.
The players interface will show a progress bar of their progress towards reaching the next level up, and once the level up is achieved, a popup will celebrate the new level. Each level can have a unique image associated with it that is displayed, as well as the description, giving you an opportunity to sprinkle some narrative into the level progression.
You can also choose to have the image on levels swap out the background image of the user interface, so you can use that imagery as a way to demonstrate progress through the story.
Currencies, Badges, Tokens
These are simple to setup, give them an icon image and then reward them from quests or training. Currencies tend to be earned so that they can then be spend on new equipment, purchasing hints, or accessing gated training if you want.
Badges come in two flavors: premium, which are shown on the main screen, and regular, which are listed when clicking the premium. They display grayscale until earned, then full color.
You can use tokens to track progress across any dimension of learning you want. For example, you could award tokens for cardiovascular cases and have a quest or badge that requires completion of 10 such cases.
Quests
Narrivate has a powerful questing system that you can leverage to guide your learner through the training. Quests can start unlocked and immediately available (great for orientation quests) or can be unlocked by training or other quests (allowing you to create quest chains).
Quest completion can require consumed and unconsumed inputs. For example, a certain Badge could be required, but not removed from inventory.
Quests can award just about any type of game resource like currencies, badges, tokens, materials, equipment, etc. They can also unlock resources, making them available for purchase in the shop (if they are a purchasable item) or unlock a quest.
Quests can link to specific training materials, and they can trigger story slides upon completion.
Story Slides
Story slides let your narrative take center stage. Create a series of slides to be shown to the learner when they first enter the game to draw them into the story and leave them inspired and curious to continue through the narrative.
Create as many of the series of slides as you like, and have them triggered on quest completion, training material completion or level up.
Story slides can use embedded videos or pictures/illustrations, with a light zooming effect to make it somewhat dynamic. These slides are presented full screen with an overlay of your text telling your tale
Hints
You create hint groups that contain a collection of hint types (questions) that a learner could ask in some types of training material. For example, you could have a hint group ‘Customer Questions’ with questions like ‘when are you looking to purchase by’ or ‘have you shopped here before’. Or a group ‘Sepsis Tests’ with questions like ‘chest xray’ or ‘blood pressure’. Each question can have a different cost associated with it
Then when you create questions in training materials, you can select one of these hint groups and give learners the opportunity to gather more information before making a decision. The costs will require them to choose the hints they want to purchase wisely!
Training Materials
Now you are ready to start adding your curriculum. Narrivate supports several different styles of training, for example:
- Multiple Choice, images or text
- Specific number or text
- Drag and drop images in the right areas
- Hotspot – click on the correct areas of image
- Fill in the blank
- SCORM packages
Those are the simplest to use as they tend to be self-grading. But Narrivate also supports instructor graded submissions and project-based team assignments.
Training Materials can be configured to reward game resources, unlock quests and trigger story slides on successful completion. Content displayed at the start of the training, as well as upon successful and unsuccessful completion can be customized and include links to other training. This can be used to go brush up or lead to the next training the user should take.
Advanced Game Mechanics
So far we’ve touched on the basics to get started building out your serious game world using simple gating and reward systems. But there are several more advanced game mechanics that can be leverage to add more depth and interest to your serious game. And more importantly, these game elements can contribute to learning without needing to complete explicit training materials: