How sub-chapters can help your viewers
One of the most powerful features of Verse is the ability to delineate between a chapter and a subchapter. As you’ve probably noticed if you’ve already started making your stories, the left-hand column in the CMS is where your chapters are organized. When you first create a chapter it is a top-level chapter, but you can take any chapter and nest it under a top-level chapter to make it a subchapter (as seen in the gif above). Any of the Verse Chapters (Video, Q&A, Slideshow, or Pathfinder) can be made into subchapters.
The Verse player neatly sorts top level chapters and hotspots in the timeline. The top-level chapters are listed numerically, while the hotspots are represented by the red boxes. If you make a chapter a subchapter, the only way a user will able to access it is via a hotspot or by accessing it via the information menu. It’s important to note this distinction because Verse allows you to hotspot to top-level chapters, but this can be problematic in the viewing experience. For example, if you make a hotspot to a top-level chapter in chapter 1 and the user clicks it, you will notice there is no “back button” so they are now in whatever chapter you’ve sent them to.
Knowing the difference between a top level chapter and a subchapter will allow you to tell the most powerful interactive stories. It’s always important to remember while interactive experiences give users the power to control their experiences, it is up to creators to guide them with smart design choices. Sub-chapters and hotspots allow you to branch off to material that is not integral to the plot of the story, but still enrich it. Hotspots are available when building Video or Pathfinder chapters.
