First Status Report
I’ve been working on this project for a few weeks now, but here’s a status report.
The website layout is mostly done, pending peer review. I still need to choose the fonts for the navigation (both comic and main navigation, thinking of using the same font). See the layout and some fonts I’m considering. Everything above the top comic nav bar/tower ad is still unfinished. Basically it’s displaying 3 options for my main menu (3 cylinders, boxes, 1 cylinder), and in orange a reminder (for me) of my (current) main menu links. I’m leaning towards 3 cylinder option… It has room to expand, still leaves room for a second logo to the right of it (with the name GameSphere Comic), and doesn’t leave me with ~600pixels to fill for a 2nd logo. The main logo is still incomplete. It will be flash with an animation (slightly fading halo) with an easter egg - a funny when you click it. Right now it might as well be an image though…
The comic is about 2 guys and a spherical gaming console. Because of this I tried to use some rounding (top, bottom comic navigation and 2/3 ideas for main navigation). It fits on 800 pixels wide (it’s actually only 746px, so scrollbar, borders, etc will fit). Yes, that’s archaic, but today’s browsers (FF3, IE7, Opera, …) have zoom anyway. In case you were wondering: the comic uses “Gill Sans MT” for the gamesphere, and “Georgia” for the humans. Fonts for the text on the website (comics info below tower ad; author/translator comments at the bottom):
font: 14px “Gill Sans MT”, Georgia, “Lucida Sans”, “Lucida Console”, Arial, Helvetica, “Times New Roman”, Times, sans-serif;
The website coding is progressing along nicely. On the end-user side, the ‘display latest’ code is ready. Shouldn’t be too hard to code in ‘display first’ or ‘display comic X’ code. On the administration side, things aren’t that evolved yet. You can add a comic, that’s about it. Yes, you can add most options you’d want (image size, type, comments, …) but there’s a few still missing. More importantly there’s no ‘browse comics’ option or an ‘edit comic’ option. So, administration is still in its initial stages.
The comics themselves are progressing - albeit slower than I’d like. It takes me roughyl 8-12 hours for a single comic (about 3-4 hours for a fully original panel). So far I’ve completed the storyline for 15 comics, the rough drafts + scans for 12 comics, and the finalized images for 3 comics. I’ll need about 30 before I get excited…
Well, that’s about it and you should be up to speed. I’m in talks for a domain name, but they’re asking $1500 which I can not afford (nor do I want to pay such amounts for what is currently a hobby).
