BRANCHTRACK

Back in 2009, they used a popular rapid authoring tool to create a branching scenario game for a team of corporate sales people. It looked nice, was fun to play and offered a lot of realistic choices and unexpected consequences to the learners. However, it spanned 200+ slides, took a long time to publish and changing anything could easily ruin the intricate web of invisible hyperlinks. So next time they used another tool. And then another. At one point, they even built their own sim engine in Flash. It read XML files and animated bubbles smoothly but authoring the scenario was still painful and had to be done on whiteboards and in Excel. They knew they had to do something.