Emotion and characters

With characters and emotions BranchTrack immediately gives intuitive and memorable feedback and shows the consequences of their choices to your learners.

For example, if your simulation deals with a customer service situation, you can display the customer’s positive or negative emotions in response to a particular offer or question.

Set the emotion for the scene by clicking one of the emoticons in scene content view.

The emotion you choose for a scene is the reaction to the learner's choice that has lead to this scene.

If the character icon  in scene view appears orange, that means a unique character has been added to this scene.

The emotion is displayed both as text next to what the character is saying and by the character him/herself.

You may begin creating your sims without characters – simply as simulated conversations in speech bubbles. But as you increase your BranchTrack skills, you will learn the massive added benefit of using emoted characters. BranchTrack offers ready-made stock characters for you to use in your training. They are photographs of individuals that feature all of BranchTrack’s emotional gamut – normal, happy, puzzled, unhappy and angry.

The tick on the image indicates the currently chosen character. You can click on another picture to use another character set. The emoticon next to the picture indicates that this character features a set of variations that shows all of the emotions. When you use these character sets, the chosen character will automatically change according to the Character emotion (one of the emoticons) chosen for the scene.

You can also use your own characters – photographs or illustrations. To do so, firstly, make sure that you have the rights to use your characters for your intended purpose – be it commercial or educational. Note that rules and regulations vary in different countries. To upload your own character, use a PNG file with a transparent background. BranchTrack will then transform and position the image as follows:

• Image is trimmed to remove unnecessary transparent areas
• Scaled up or down to 460 px height
• Placed on the left side of the sim
• Aligned to the bottom of the simulation

Characters look best in BranchTrack when cropped to their waistline.

Currently you can only upload character’s emotions separately and emote them “manually” by choosing an emoted character for each scene. If you would like to upload a character set you intend to use frequently, please contact support@branchtrack.com and we will create the set for you.

Upload a single character from your computer by clicking Upload image in the character panel of a scene. The character will stay in your character gallery and will be available for use in any of your simulations. Upload several emoted versions of the character and use them in unison with the Character emotion controls in every scene. Note that when using this method, you have to manually change the emotion in every scene – both the image and the emoticon in scene view.

The default action BranchTrack takes with characters is that the character used in the first scene is inherited in the following scenes. You can change that by simply clicking another character in the scene’s character panel or choosing No character.

Please note that BranchTrack adapts to the screen sizes of various devices and that means that there will be differences between how your character will be displayed, for example, on PC versus a smartphone.

Here is a sim in PC view:

And here is the same sim in mobile portrait view:

In each simulation you can use as many different characters as you need, but only one can be displayed at once in a scene.