Team member, Ellie, explains how she used Near-Life and Canva to make a fun, interactive Easter game, which can be embedded on a website or shared directly.
This Easter, I knew I wanted to try something a bit different to last year and show the various ways you can use Near-Life to create interactivity. So, just doing a regular Easter Egg hunt was out of the question. Instead, I opted for a puzzle game with an Easter storyline.
Planning the game
To start, I made a list of the various puzzles I wanted to include. I also had to consider how I could build them into the storyline. You should spend some time considering the different aspects of your game. Do you want music? If so, the pages will need to be downloaded as videos (MP4) and you will need to ensure that they are long enough for the end-user to make their choices. You can also set it to freeze the screen at the end so the video will not progress until an interaction is made, however, this is not always the best idea if your scene has music. If you don’t want music, you might choose to use still slides.
Using Canva to create the content
Working with Canva is always pretty simple since they have so many resources. If you’re stuck on a theme, you can check out their templates to get an idea. I had a look through their templates to find a style for the video, then I could begin the creative process. I made each scene and every puzzle, ranging from hangman to spot the difference. I also made use of Canva’s audio selection for the background too. Once I was happy, I could download each page individually and name each appropriately.
Using Near-Life to make it interactive
With the scenes downloaded, I could go onto Near-Life. It’s worth noting that this part of the process is quick and easy. In fact, the most time-consuming part of the process when it comes to building interactive videos with Near-Life is making your media.
To build the interactive video, I uploaded all my media. I then added each piece of media in the right sequence. This game would not be a branching scenario – meaning there are not alternative storylines depending on the choices you make. There are just right and wrong answers, and if you answer incorrectly you’ll be given the chance to try again. With each piece of media added and the interactions put into place, the interactive video came together pretty quickly. Here’s a screenshot of the platform for the spot-the-difference scene so you can see how the hotspots work:
I set a conditional for the NEXT button so it would only appear once all of the differences were spotted. I also chose to make both the left and right images have hotspots that the end-user could click to identify a difference. This was to try and make sure nobody would get confused.
Getting feedback
Once I had previewed the video a few times to make sure everything was right, I could then share it with the rest of the team for feedback.
Want to create your own interactive videos?
Click here to learn more about how Canva and Near-Life work well together, or book a demo to speak with one of our team.