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It might not sound like the most interesting app in the world, but Apple’s go-to tool for creating perfect presentations can provide some serious fun when you begin to explore some of its finer features. Keynote’s animations, hyperlinking tools and colourful formatting options make it a highly suitable app for creating games.
In this tutorial, we’ve harnessed the power of Keynote to create a ‘choose your own adventure’ game, which follows a basic narrative with players choosing the course of the story through different options. It might sound complex, but it’s easily done. You’ll need to have an idea of how your game’s narrative will pan out, as well as some of the choices to be made. Once you’ve got your ideas together it’s time to get started.
Step 1: Start from scratch
Start your Keynote adventure game by creating a new Keynote presentation and selecting a theme from the Theme Chooser – pick one that suits your game.
Step 2: The start screen
Your first slide should simply contain your game’s title and a link to start the game. Keep this as simple as possible by using the theme’s title slide design as a base.
Step 3: Add a slide
As you progress through your game design, you’ll need to keep adding new slides. You do this by clicking on the New button in the top- left corner of the window.
Step 4: Hyperlinks
Head back to slide one, highlight your start link text and check the Enable as hyperlink option under the Hyperlink heading of Keynote’s multi- functional Inspector window.
Step 5: Drag and drop
To add images to your game, simply drag and drop them straight from Finder or iPhoto into Keynote. They may well need resizing to fit onto your slides perfectly.
Step 6: Text and images
Where an option in your game contains both text and images, you’ll need to group them so they both link together. Select them both and click Arrange>Group in the menu bar.
Step 7: Create dead ends
Your game should feature some wrong decisions to keep things interesting. When you make the resulting pages, they should always contain a link back to the start.
Step 8: Slide number links
Links don’t just have to skip to the next slide, you can select a slide number from the Inspector window to jump to anywhere within your Keynote game.
Step 9: A happy ending
It’s tempting to go on forever and ever once you’ve got the hang of linking from one slide to another, but it’s important to make a stand-out ending like this one!
