Digital games are becoming a rising trend in e-Learning due to their potential educational benefits. However, their application is hindered by issues such as their high production costs and the difficulty of getting instructors involved in the development process, a required aspect in order to achieve educational value. In this paper we propose to tackle those issues by developing new, instructor-oriented, authoring tools for educational videogames. These principles are carried out in the platform: a complete instructor-oriented authoring toolkit for educational point-and-click adventure videogames.

Working from the belief that when content is king, content experts should lead, a storyboard-driven approach provides a sound methodology for developing educational games that helps ensure that no good storyboard becomes a bad game. The storyboard-driven approach provides a sound methodology for developing games that have as their keystone the final product's content. Adventure games focus on content. When we add the educational goal into the mix, this becomes even more relevant. From this notion, instead of adapting the content to fit the technology, we adapt the technology to fit the content. Even though the resulting process might seem burdensome compared to more streamlined processes, this approach has a specific focus that ensures that no good storyboard becomes a bad game.

Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs) are notations that allow instructors to formally describe educational processes, including teaching and learning interactions and activities. The description of a specific teaching process using an EML is called a learning design. EMLs, where IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) is becoming a "de facto" standard, address aspects such as the interoperability and reusability of teaching practices across learning management systems. However, the actual application of EMLs is being hindered by different problems such as the technical skills required to use typical EMLs and the difficulty of understanding and maintaining preexisting learning designs. Thus, to promote the adoption of EMLs, it is necessary to provide more user-friendly tools and methodologies to facilitate their assimilation and reduce the workload required to use them. In this paper, we present the e-LD system, which provides a graphical notation to design or redesign learning designs, an import-modification-export process to reengineer IMS LD learning designs, and a tool to generate and analyze dependencies between different IMS LD elements.