MrHoatzin

Do I build Storyboardo or tell my story in an off-the-shelf environment?

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I've been working on this story for a while now. I am not anywhere near done with Hobo Lobo. Ok, that is not true, the light at the end of the tunel is so visible. I just have to free myself from daydreaming about the other project, work, real life, fun, self-loathing, twitter, etc to actually wrap it up.

The new story is shaping up to be in a format of a puzzle-less adventure game, where you the reader are the compass of the protagonist, but there are no real puzzles to solve or conversation options to navigate. You're just exploring this world and there happens to be a character that you're sortof following through his story. And he talks to people and you get to decide which lines of dialogue to pursue or in what order. Gates are formed by story beats that you need to read before narrative will continue out of an area, or explicit moments of navigating away from an area, like leaving down the road starts the much-talked-about journey with no turning back, etc.

I came up with this story while thinking of something to debut this new web-based comic cms that I have been thinking of and building on and off (mostly off) for at least three four years (ugh, whois storyboardo.com says domain was registered 08-nov-2011).

The cms, Storyboardo, what little of it I have built is kinda badass! The proof of concept is sexy and there is nothing like it out there still. I imagine it as a decent basic solution for anyone to host their comics in a classy setup but it will have some other tricks up its sleeve. Namely layers—with backgrounds, sprites, styled text objects and any kind of arbitrary content definable into a new layer type—with its own properties tied to rules for display, methods of interaction, behavior—in the admin side and the frontend. On the frontend, as a reader, when you click the next button, sometimes it will move you to the next page, sometimes it will change the sprites around, sometimes it will just advance the speech bubbles. Storyboardo effectively adds pacing and special effects and pans and zooms and freer visual editing abilities into the repertoire of your webcomic artist-writer.

SO!

Do I build it?

I have a proof of concept and a small mountain of PHP backend groundwork, a working purpose-agnostic data server that is the backbone of everything else I'll graft onto it, smatterings of AJAX and a fun extensible oo structure. The interface is fun and unobtrusive. I'll have fun with the v0 default design for it. :tup:

But it is going to be such a huge time sink to get it off the ground. My update schedule history is fucked as it is. Herzog the Vile is technically still only taking a break. :tdown:

But but Storyboardo's a neat idea! I can totally make it and make the world a better place. Lots of good karma and hopefully some secondary good vibes from other people's adventure game-comics! :tup: :tup:

But but but, I really want to tell my story and not get bogged down in the production and maintenance of an open source project. :tdown:

Hobo Lobo for all its promise of novelty is clunky as hell. Due to the games I have played with z-indices, I can't plug in accelerated CSS transforms of today's whizbang web upon its main parallax movements without breaking everything. I dread making some kind of unforeseen deal with the HTML of today in making Storyboardo that will bite me in the ass in the medium-long run. :tdown:

Even now, four years later, I can't make a good mobile version of Hobo Lobo. Only way I see to get it on tablets and phones and looking good is a rebuilt nativeish (i.e. not html) code special edition. :tup: / :tmeh:

But Storyboardo is not about cutting edge effect-heavy motion stuff with a million PNGs requiring infinity production to make happen. It is a bit more resilient a structure. :tup:

And having something technical to bite into will keep me sane in those times when I need a break from writing, drawing, etc. :tup:

But I get to deal with technical things if I decide to go the non-Storyboardo route, so I get my fix of wearing many hats anyway. And I yearn for the possibilities of effects and polish that come from not building for the clunky broken bullshit that is the web and its production pipeline. :tup: :tup:

The audiences of today would not be baffled by my comic-like non-game if I release it as one as they might have been a few short years ago. :tup:

And maybe I can sell it more easily as an executable than a website? I was thinking about giving a prologue for free and selling access to following episodes of the story through some kind of tbd store mechanism that would plug into Storyboardo... but on the other hand in-app purchases are a known quantity and I probably don't have to dick around with boilerplate code nearly as much. Having it on computers around the world makes it more real somehow than if it were sitting on a single server and merely visited.  :buyme::fart:

It is really an opportunity cost thing I guess. I waste so much time locked in weird abstractions as it is, of thought, of engineering. Who cares for yet another sexy cms with ideas and whatnot? I just want to get my stories in front of people.

But Storyboardo could be its own word-of-mouth marketing engine that delivers said stories in front of people... etc etc etc

 

:campbell::frusty::broken::dopefish:

What do you guys think?

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So if the idea of Storyboardo that you upload single panels, arrange them and add pans and zooms? I would think that would be well received, especially if you included some backgrounds and characters in case they don't want to draw.

As far as which project to commit to, I am bad at this myself. Personally I wouldn't want to maintain something like that unless it was making money. But a single priject doesn't take much maintainance. If the single project is similar to the tool-project, maybe you could make the single project to demo the tool? You might have already said that.

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You build in layers in the editing mode, and you get the flexibilities that go with that. Layers are backgrounds with sprites for characters and speech bubbles. Imagine a marriage of photoshop's layers and flash's timeline with keyframes. That is what editing Storyboardo will be like. As a reader on the front end, when you click the standard slideshow nav arrows, if there are keyframes it will move to the next keyframe, if it is the end, it will try to load the next page. At any keyframe the editor can toggle the visibility of layers (and they will pop in or pop out according to their pre-defined default in or out animation) and/or define some kind of JS function that gets executed.


Long comic conversations of old with their tall stacks of bubbles can now be split into multiple back and forth bubbles. Changing expressions, moving dudes around, basic directing goes a long way.

 

A derivative layer type could be a conversation, which consists of a back and forth dialogue text block with different participants given different coordinates for bubble placement—and sortof grafts itself across as many keyframes as the conversation necessitates—or alternatively hijacks the prev/next buttons until it's exhausted, whichever method ends up having a more coherent implementation.

A custom layer could be Sierra-style conversation with a vignette closeup of the person talking, with some kind of sprite-based (or whatever) animation cycle.

I guess it all comes from my annoyance at having text and images share the same real estate. I never liked that about comics and this is my attempt at side stepping the issue and making something that would facilitate more comics formatted like something halfway between Homestuck and the traditional comic. The end result will be something more movie-like than comic-like. There will be no inherent need to split pages into panels, but there is no reason panels couldn't be used.


This will give way to shitty found clipart & rage comics, and that's great, who cares. I am more excited about making adventure games in it—a setting to explore by clicking on hotspots, things to collect. In this paradigm a page becomes a room, and characters can be proper animated sprites. Remove the next/prev buttons and move between rooms/pages through doorway hotspots, and presto! A savegame system can work either through logging in or through cookies, depending on what makes more sense relative to the complexity of the gamestates that need to be saved.

 

But also, eh, I could just jump straight into making my story in something else. Get to use particles. Use LUA or whatever instead of JS/JSON. Have path-finding characters if I want to...

 

Another :tup: for Storyboardo would be getting to devblog it. Making it out in the open could be fun...

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It's always a tough decision to dive into a new enterprise, especially one you know will eat up a lot of your time. I think the true metric should be how enthusiastic you are for this. You've been doodling on it for four years, you haven't grown tired of it yet... I'd say that's as good a sign as any that you should go for it (and finish HobLob ofc).

 

So basically Storyboardo is the new Director but online.

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I'm not sure I have an answer, but here are a few questions:


Are you planning on using this for multiple projects of your own?  Would it save you time in the long run?

Is this platform agnostic?  Could I use this to produce say an xml file that I can use in Unity, Game Maker, Unreal, etc?   If so, you could stand to make a bit from selling it on the Unity asset store or a similar place

Have you planned out exactly what you want to build or is this more of something you've been building ad hoc?

Has any of the code been commented, or is any documentation written?

Could I use this for other purposes?  Maybe as a slideshow widget on a website?

Has anyone else tried using it yet? (or what of it currently exists)

Are there any libraries you are currently using that you would have to license to use in Storyboardo?  Do you have any of the business related concerns taken care of in the event you want to sell it? (taxes, income and the like)

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It's always a tough decision to dive into a new enterprise, especially one you know will eat up a lot of your time. I think the true metric should be how enthusiastic you are for this. You've been doodling on it for four years, you haven't grown tired of it yet... I'd say that's as good a sign as any that you should go for it (and finish HobLob ofc).

So basically Storyboardo is the new Director but online.

 

But I'm tired of the internet and its technologies!

 

On the other hand, I am good at it and could make something nice as a last hurrah before I become a jaded old internet man.

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Are you planning on using this for multiple projects of your own?  Would it save you time in the long run?

 

Probably. The next comic project is an large world-building undertaking with many episodes/chapters/arcs in it.

 

Is this platform agnostic?  Could I use this to produce say an xml file that I can use in Unity, Game Maker, Unreal, etc?   If so, you could stand to make a bit from selling it on the Unity asset store or a similar place

 

It is a lot of PHP and JS and HTML and CSS—but I do want to make it so that one could poop out an archive of assets and an xml/json that could be agnostic of the web Storyboardo, but it would need a Storyboardo built in something else to work. I dunno if it can ever really automagically be divorced from JS tho if the story is too coding-intensive.

 

Have you planned out exactly what you want to build or is this more of something you've been building ad hoc?

 

I've been making CMSs for a decade and change. I know what I am doing and what I want it to do that, say, WordPress or Codeigniter or Drupal are not meant for. If anything, trying to anticipate too much before I commit to any solution and put down code is tripping me up.

 

Has any of the code been commented, or is any documentation written?

 

I am commenting it exhaustively, but I might need help writing more robust documentation. It could be a stepping stone for artists who're not well versed in programming. Just like Flash was back in the day.

 

Could I use this for other purposes?  Maybe as a slideshow widget on a website?

 

It is more than a widget, it is a full-featured website CMS on its own. It wants to live alone on a domain, or at least have its own dedicated nook. You could poke a hole in it and put a forum or wp there tho.

 

Has anyone else tried using it yet? (or what of it currently exists)

 

Nope, the spine of it, the layer mechanism is largely in the concept stage right now. I have a working prototype on the side which needs to be chopped up and rebuild to be more extendable.

 

Are there any libraries you are currently using that you would have to license to use in Storyboardo?  Do you have any of the business related concerns taken care of in the event you want to sell it? (taxes, income and the like)

 

I am thinking about making it GNU. Everything I am using is GNU GPL-friendly. If I want to make a community around it, I feel that would be better way to go than a tool I have to sell and support extensively.

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What you're doing sounds interesting, but I think you're getting caught up in the classic mistake of building something ambitious in your head without having much to show for it. There are two problems here:

 

1) you work yourself up over all the little details of a project and overwhelm yourself before you even get started. You alluded to this a little, I believe.

 

2) concepts are perfect, tangible things are flawed. Once you get some of this stuff working, you'll understand your project a lot better, and may want to make changes in the concept.

 

I've personally dealt with both these issues a lot. I've found that the best plan is to just start building things. Building out smaller components of the bigger idea will give you greater insight into what you're building. Getting user feedback will answer the "will anyone use this thing?" question, and may help build a community over time.

 

Specifically for tools, there's a clear delineation between "editor" and "runtime". I build a lot of little tools for the games I make, and I *always* start on the runtime.  The first thing I do is define the overall data structure, just a json thing or whatever. Then I work on the runtime part... loading the file into the game/app/whatever and seeing it actually work. Right here, I can already create a bunch of cool stuff by manually editing the files without getting bogged down in designing/coding an editor. Then I alternate between creating stuff and working on the tools to interact with the data files. As you design more levels/comics/whatever you get a better understanding of what the editor should look like, etc.

 

The most important thing is that you have a tangible piece of software, and it instantly makes the whole project a lot less scary, a lot easier for you to understand, and a lot easier to actually plan/scope. Plus, people can interact with it, give you feedback, and maybe even get excited about it?

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