14 steps to create a serious game for training

What do you need to create a serious game?

Less than you think. No coding required: the guide is built around the Editor, the authoring tool from Game Strategies (formerly Gamelearn), where you put together levels, scenes, dialogues and mini-games without writing a line of code. What you do need is a method.

Every training game stands on three pillars. And the order matters: content first, then practice, and only then the story that wraps it all together. If the content isn’t good, no amount of game design will save it.

• Content: the theory, the course itself.
• Practice: the activities and simulations where players apply what they learn and get feedback.
• Story: adventure, suspense or investigation, so they want to make it to the end.

Less content, more learning: the 3-hour rule

The classic mistake is trying to cram everything in. The guide recommends keeping each game under 3 hours: three 3-hour games beat one 9-hour marathon. Got a lot to teach? Think series with episodes, not a feature film.

And two-thirds of those 3 hours go on learning to play, practicing and following the story. That leaves an hour of content, tops, about what you’d cover in a one-hour talk. So step 2 is cutting: at least 20% of your first outline. Then go back and cut again.

Whatever survives becomes roughly 10 lessons, introduced gradually (one concept and practice; a second, then practice with both…) and backed by plenty of repetition. Each lesson should take 3 minutes max to read, hear or watch. Skip the consultant-speak: learners want a toolkit of solutions, not definitions.

Practice and mistakes: the beating heart of a serious game

This is what sets a game apart from a slide-based course. Every lesson needs a mechanic to put it into practice, with personalized feedback on what the player did well and what needs work.

The guide gets very concrete with the Editor’s building blocks: to teach sales arguments, a conversation with a prospect where the player makes decisions and gains or loses points; to tell two engine parts apart, an image mini-game; to check that company values have sunk in, a question mini-game before the adventure moves on.

You can play it two ways: explain first and practice after, or throw players in without the theory, show them their mistakes and let them try again with the lesson in hand. The second stings a little more, but it lets them compare their result with and without your advice.

Story, core loop and points: why they keep playing

Only once you know what to teach and how it’s practiced do you write the story. The tip: tie the plot to the subject. In a negotiation course, the player could be a merchant or a sports agent; in leadership, the leader of a sports team; in customer service, a waiter chasing employee of the month. And feel free to borrow from your favorite books and films.

Next comes the mechanic: the game’s goal and its core loop, the sequence that repeats again and again. In Merchants, the negotiation game the guide uses as an example, the player negotiates, gets feedback, hears from a mentor, replays the negotiation and watches the company grow, across 6 levels.

Finish with the scoring system. The Editor offers three types: game scores (up to 4, they decide the ranking), competencies (up to 8, they track the skills you’re teaching) and a grade (for assessment, shown only at the end if you choose). Points aren’t mandatory, but they give motivation and completion a real boost.

From outline to testing: build it without getting lost

The second half of the guide is pure production. First, decide how players move around (map, doors, active or locked scenes). Then write the step outline: levels, scenes and action flows, with content, practice and story evenly spread. The guide walks through a full example: a meteor heading for Earth and a race-against-the-clock project to destroy it.

With the outline locked, write the script with every line of text. Then a trick that saves hours: build the shell first, a playable skeleton with no text, to check everything fits before adding the muscle. Meanwhile, list every asset you need (images, videos, audio) and keep them all in one folder.

The final boss is testing. At least two rounds with people who weren’t involved: 3 or 4 testers to catch the obvious bugs, then 10 to 30 for the hidden ones. Never launch without it: a small bug can turn dramatic once real players are in.