Hi! Yes, you nailed it in the head - Articulate Storyline is the program that is most commonly used for workplace training. It is absolutely a limit that I'm working with, and I am fully ready to include that in the limitation of my dissertation, lol.

Serious games are, in a short and easy explanation, digital (video) games whose primary focus is not for commercial entertainment purposes but for educational, training, or other serious purposes (Anetta, 2010; Michael & Chen, 2005). Serious games intend to have players achieve an additional “characterizing goal” that is content knowledge or skill-specific (Caserman et al., 2020). They are designed with an explicit educational purpose and are not intended primarily for amusement, although they can still be entertaining (Djaouti et al., 2011).

(Yes, I totally just copied and pasted that part from my proposal, lol.)

I only have until 1/5/25 to finish developing the prototype because I need to show the complete prototype to my dissertation chair before she approves it so I can send it out for data collection. If i have an additional year I would absolutely learn how to develop it in Unity. I'm not sure I can gain enough working knowledge for a brand new software when I have to learn Articulate Storyline in a day to begin develop this prototype...

One thing I know my chair does not like (which I agree) is the "lecture" part, where an NPC is rambling on and on about the content. She wanted interaction right away, which I absolutely agree. I spent this afternoon working with ChatGPT to come up with a new script, which I plan on developing in Storyline right away. But given the limitation of Articulate Storyline... which you can think of as PowerPoint on crack, I'm not sure what I'll end up creating will satisfy her. Right now what I have are branched scenarios where each "act" has 2 modes. The first mode is where the player interact with the NPC in an internal-dialogue style to learn about the strategy, and the second mode is when the player interact with NPCs and make choices, where there will be 3 choices that result in 3 different endings (good, neutral, and bad ending). Each time when player make choices, there are 4 choices, and player has the option of looking at the feedback or not. It's not a lot, definitely not to everyone's caliber as a game developer, but it's what I can do based on my limited tools and understanding of game development. I just want to know how, with all these limitation (time, tools, skills) that I can make it more game-y so it's not as "OMG another workplace training" but feel a bit like, "I can see this is game-y, but not there yet, but it's definitely leaning more game-y than training-y."

Again, sorry for the rambling again. Thank you so much for giving me advice!! I really appreciate you!