Demo: Artie’s Christmas Surprise

Last week I spent some time working on a silly little Storyline project: Artie’s Christmas Surprise, and today I’m ready to share a little bit about it.

The Concept

I downloaded this rad set of Dog Infographic objects from Creative Market awhile back, and figured I had to use them for something, so I came up with a little story about Artie a dog who just became a single-parent and is strapped to come up with gift ideas for his 8 pups as the holidays fast approach. The pups get to play a little game of puppy plinko to determine their gifts, and then I link out to several of my favourite charities to donate to over the holiday season. There’s poop involved – I told you it was silly.

The Method

Inspired by the infographic set and some other icons (that I can’t quite remember where I downloaded them from…), I came up with the story. I sourced some audio and modified Artie a bit to suit my purposes.

On the intro slide, we meet Artie. He has a little oof and a wagging tail (created using motion paths).
On the second slide, we learn about Artie’s current situation, which makes use of some animations and audio.
On the third slide, we learn about Artie’s monthly income and expenses, using several of the infographic icons, a ton of animations, and A LOT of kibble (amen to grouping objects)!
On the fourth slide, we see that Artie has decked himself out in holiday cheer and come up with a great idea – puppy plinko!
On the fifth slide, the pups are all set up for puppy plinko – I mocked up the plinko board based on the ever popular game show game, and controlled all of the plinko chips (albeit their addresses were forced and not dynamic) using motion paths. I also added states to all of the pups and created some variables so that the slide would advance only after all pups had been visited and only after all of the motion path animations had been completed and changed to a value of True.
On the sixth slide, we see how Artie did with all of his gifts.
On the seventh slide, we link out to some charities, using buttons and hyperlinks.

I also created custom navigation buttons because I’m not the biggest fan of the default ones.

The Result

I think the result was pretty darn cute and it made me laugh (and simultaneously feel delirious), so hopefully it can garner a chuckle out of you!