Naming Steps - Best Conventions

While there's no requirement on how the steps are named (you can even name them the exact same name between each other, as they're identified by the editor by the stepID), there are some best practices that are crucial to understand before naming your steps. Let's have a closer look on how you should name your steps and why.

Naming Content Blocks

Give the Steps short and descriptive names which allow anyone to quickly see what the Step is about. It's also very useful to use short codes to remind which part of the tutorial the Steps belongs to. This makes the flow easier to understand, the steps quick to locate and the tutorial very easy to debug, if you have a structure that goes around the tutorial.

For example, the steps in the setup sequence might be something like: "SET-001 Set Up Decks", "SET–002 Set up Dice" etc. Using this method, you will already have some understanding on where the step belongs during the tutorial.

The other crucial aspect why the steps should have an ID in their name is because of the custom voice overs, that some of the tutorials will have. For example, if a step USED to be named "Board Setup" and it has a paired voiceover file "board setup.mp3", but then step name was changed to "Preparing play area" and now there's no voiceover file for that.

When using this method you might run into a situation where you will have steps say SET-006 and SET-007 and there's a need to add a step in between, a good way to solve this is name the middle step SET-006B so that it will show in the correct spot in any alphabetical lists too.

And finally, there are always situations where you remove steps from the actual flow of the tutorial: you might want to try a new approach, you use them as copy-paste steps or they're removed for some other reason but kept in the tutorial. A good way to identify these steps is to immediately give them a unique identifier, such as "zzz" in the beginning of the name.

This way custom VO's aren't recorded for these steps and any translators will not spend time translating them, as the software used does not understand whether a step is a part of the flow or not.

Naming Logic Blocks

While you can have more creative freedom with the logic block names, there's a couple of good conventions with them as well.

If there's logic in the block, you could give the block a "LO" identifier in the beginning. Such as "LO has the setup been taught?". It's easy for anyone outsider to quickly see where the logics happen in the tutorial.

If you use the block to control the flow try to use the same naming convention, such as "Flow Control 001", "Flow Control 002". Once again, it makes the tutorial easier to read and you can quickly see that these blocks won't have anything inside them.

Start and End should be named just like that, for example #START and #END - again to quickly be able to find them.

Naming the blocks in in a descriptive and short way, will help anyone understand quickly, what the logic block tries to achieve. Such as "LO increase $round" or "LO Jump to Start".