It'd be a Crime not to Show this Comic

[June Scarlet]

And therefore, I plan to make this NaNoWriMo a month where I work on Crime Show Comic, my upcoming parody of crime dramas. In years past I've listed out my many projects, and those still exist, but this year I'm going to try and focus on just the one for this.

That said, there's a lot of tasks that go into launching this comic. I'll list them out now.

Comic creation:
-Idea
-Script
-Sketch
-Lineart
-Background
-Color
-Posting

Other:
-Website Coding
-Website Hosting
-Social Media Research
-Webcomic Hosting Research
-Advertising
-Launching
-Keeping in practice with drawing characters

I have some of these done already, like the ideas and scripts. Other stuff will take some work, like figuring out where to host this half-finished website I've already started coding. And of course, I have to actually make the comics.

I still be working on other tasks throughout the month, such as working on the Neopets/Geekify RPG. But I'm going to try and make this the focus of my free time, and hopefully work on it a bit every day.

[June Scarlet]

Yesterday I started this thread, and started planning out steps to take to get this comic up.

Today I sketched Lisa and Franklin for about an hour, particularly Franklin. I'm experimenting giving him and other male figures a bit more of a waist, so they're not so boxy. Might have to do some figure drawing practice this weekend.

I also did some more research on hosting the website I've made.

This article from official docs lists several options and how to connect to them, without recommending any over any other: create-react-app.dev/docs/deployment/

This Reddit thread is a decent conversation into recommending different hosts for React websites: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/pczkwk/where_should_i_host_a_react_website/

This blog lists out different options and their benefits: blog.logrocket.com/8-ways-deploy-react-app-free/

I notice that a lot of searches turn up free options. I'm willing to pay for hosting, however that's not what I'm finding particularly. The last article mentioned signing up for several, since they're free, and seeing which best suits your needs, so I might end up doing that.

I do think that GitHub Pages isn't right for this project, though. It's more for single-page static websites, and this one is a little more than that. So I can rule out that, at least. I have the comics as an API that React takes in and displays, but it's just a file within the project right now. Might be nice to have a host that has an API host built in.

[June Scarlet]

The other day, I decide to re-explore the idea of using simplified figures for background and one-off characters. This was after a conversation on the bloids asking who would be the human in a Muppet version of your story.

I finally did some sketching to the effect today. Having a bit of trouble getting things to turn out on model, but I sketched anyway. And I drew a test panel, which I will share when I'm not so tired. I'm not sure if the featureless figure works, but I do think this featureless figure works better than the last one, at least.

Also in the midst of sketching, I came up with the basis for a new comic. It's been a while since I've done that for Crime Show, so that's exciting.

[June Scarlet]

Looking into hosts now. I've narrowed it down to these, I think, from the earlier article.

vercel.com/
vercel.com/docs/concepts/limits/overview
vercel.com/pricing

www.netlify.com
www.netlify.com/blog/2019/02/26/netlify-and-bandwidth/
www.netlify.com/pricing/

www.heroku.com/home
devcenter.heroku.com/articles/limits
www.heroku.com/pricing

render.com/
render.com/docs/free
render.com/pricing

Okay, took out Heroku because it's just too complicated looking. The pricing page alone...

Still looking at the other four, but I'm ready to go to bed now, so I'll explore more later.

[June Scarlet]

Ended up doing more research on webhosts today. I also worked on the website itself. Added a link at the bottom of each comic that links to the comic, for easy sharing. Also made it so you can click the button to copy the link to the clipboard, though I want to have a confirmation popup or something to confirm that you have indeed copied the link.

[June Scarlet]

Worked on making a direct link copying feature for my website, now the popup/toast works because I remembered I used bootstrap for this project, so it was easier than expected.

I decided to try Render for hosting my website. I played around with my GitHub settings a while, then uploaded my website. And... it's actually live. It's got some problems, so I'm not going to publicly post it here yet, but it's live. I've even got the custom domain configured.

Right now, the simplest form of the url works, you know, the example.whatever, but if you add the routing, the slashes and hash signs, like example.whatever/comics#test, if you take that direct link and paste it into your address bar, it doesn't load the app, it just says "Not Found". So that's something to look into next time.

Also, my metadata is the generic ReactJS stuff, so I'll want to update the favicon and header and such.

But hey, big progress!

[June Scarlet]

Finally fixed direct link. It took all weekend researching and looking up different solutions and such. I found the answer this morning.

This was the answer that fixed the problem: stackoverflow.com/questions/72490668/how-to-navigate-to-a-specific-section-of-the-page-on-page-load-using-react-route

Though I put it in a useEffect instead of a componentDidMount.

Shout out to this one as well, it helped me understand the questions I needed to search: stackoverflow.com/questions/43441856/how-to-scroll-to-an-element

[June Scarlet]

On the 28th, I shared this example comic panel on Discord, and got some feedback.

SPOILER: Click to show

The first feedback said that they got that it was supposed to be nobody sort of character, where their appearance isn't important so they just sort of appear as a silhouette. They also said that the floating head was a bit weird and they'd give them simple arms for better expression. But ultimately, it doesn't look too weird with the characters with designs.

The second feedback I got was that without context they thought the figure was a ghost, and wondered if it'd be clear with context that it isn't a ghost.

Adding in arms and a neck shouldn't be too difficult. I'm a bit more concerned that they don't appear as a ghost. In context, most of these background nobodies will be suspects, but I don't know if the context is clear enough since the comics are so short.

I'll give it another try.

It's December now, so I want to make one more post to wrap things up.

[June Scarlet]

Overall, I say I made some great progress this past month, even with taking a break in the middle of it. I think my biggest accomplishment is researching and publishing the website. I also made some progress on the background character designs. Oh! And I also came up with a new script, so that's good.

I'll continue to work on Crime Show, and I think that's most important of all.

Good NaNo, and that's a wrap!