Powerpoint Game Design Hack #2

For today’s Tay’s Tip, I share how I utilize the Duplicate command to hack my design process when making a PowerPoint game for my classroom. Specifically, I will be talking about how it’s useful when duplicating objects with animations applied.

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The Duplicate Command

What it does

This command sounds just like what it does: It makes an exact copy of an object in your PowerPoint, including duplicating any animations that were applied to the original object.

How you do it

There are multiple ways you can carry out this command:

1. Select an object → Go to the “Home” tab → Click the arrow next to the “Copy” icon and select “Duplicate”

2. Select an object → Press “Ctrl + D” (Windows) or “Command + D” (Mac) on your keyboard

3. Hold down the “Ctrl” key, then click and drag an object (you can additionally hold down “Shift” to keep the duplicated object aligned to the original object)

NOTE: Copying and pasting also provide the same results, I just find duplication faster since my hacks involve remaining on one slide.

How I utilize it

Just like the Change Picture command I talked about in my last post, this is another valuable time-saving feature, especially when it comes to making games with score-tracking or question-choosing slides.

First, let’s take a look at the scoring slide of my Find the Impostor game. In this game, teams lose and gain lives portrayed on this slide by mini crewmates and dead bodies. When I click on a crewmate, a dead body appears (lost a life), and if I click on the dead body, the crewmate reappears (gained a life). You can do this with each life pictured on the slide.

The animation sequence for this effect isn't too complicated. However, making sure you have the right trigger point for each image can be very time-consuming, especially if you create each of the animation sequences individually. WHO HAS TIME FOR THAT?! To get around that whole ordeal, all I had to do was create one full animation sequence with both images and duplicate that image set. Not only did the animations duplicate along with the images, but the trigger points adjusted on their own too. So, if you click one of the duplicated images, it reacts just as the original does.

Finally, to change the colors for the teams, I used the Change Picture command. Doing so allowed me to easily change the images without disrupting the animations already in place. See the magic that can happen with these two commands? So much easier and faster. I finished this slide within ten minutes.

Now for an example of how the Duplicate command can be utilized when making a question-choosing slide. Let’s take a look at my Nick’s Wilde Deal review game. This game features a slide where you select a button to choose a review question. Once you click a button, it goes to a corresponding question slide (via hyperlink). Then, when you go back to the question-choosing slide, the clicked button disappears due to its exit animation applied to the button.

If I were making this slide the long way, I would create each one of these buttons, add an exit animation to each of them, then go in and change their trigger points one by one. The trigger point is the point at which you want an animation to play. Usually, this is automatically, on a click, or after or with another animation. However, you can also set the trigger point to when you click on a certain object. In this case, I made the trigger point of each button’s exit animation to be when I clicked on a button itself.

You can imagine how setting the trigger points individually for each button can get tedious. This is where the Duplicate command comes in. Instead, apply the exit animation of the first button, set the trigger to itself, and then duplicate that button as many times as you need. The trigger points automatically adjust to each new button, so there's no extra work for you to do. All you then need to do is edit the letters and apply the correct hyperlinks, and you are good to go!

So, that’s how I use the Duplicate command to hack my workflow when designing a PowerPoint game. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below! I hope it was helpful, have a great day everyone! :)