New Comic Publishing Utility for Newgrounds

[alsoknownas1]

Hello arts people!                                                                  

                                                                            

If you've ever thought about publishing long form comics on Newgrounds, you may want to check out Bando's Comic Wizard, a new utility that can embed your comic pages in a viewer ready to be uploaded to the games portal.            

                                                                            

This is the same technology we at Montrose use to publish Paradise Slice but now in easy to use drag and drop "wizard" form that's hosted right here on Newgrounds.       

                                                                            

The wizard itself will walk you through the entire process, but basically you number your pages, put them in a folder with your comics title, and drag and drop. The utility then let's you download a zip file that's ready to upload.                                   

                                                                            

The viewer features:

• Smooth streaming of pages using intelligent preloading
• No additional image recompression
• Loading indicator
• Mouse navigation
• Touch navigation
• Arrow-key navigation
• Browser navigation (forward and back) 
• Compatibility with browser zoom-in and zoom-out 
• Bookmarking of individual pages
• "Right-click" image saving

In addition to being ready to upload to Newgrounds, the zip files the wizard produces are a hybrid format that's also ready to server from a generic web server (just uncompress into a served directory) and can be read by most dedicated comic viewer apps (although you may need to rename the .zip to a .cbz).

                                                                            

If you like this sort of thing, check out our Newgrounds Art Scheduler.         

                                                                            

And--of course--if you try out the wizard and need any kind of help, feel free to post here!                             

                                                                            

Happy comicing comikers!

                                                   

                                                               

[Mabelma]

The wizard itself will walk you through the entire process, but basically you number your pages, put them in a folder with your comics title, and drag and drop. The utility then let's you download a zip file that's ready to upload.                                   

This is a really neat tool! Great work on the development, I think one extra nice function would be to be able to play music from the NG portal while you're reading the comic so it doesn't feel so silent but other than that, really nice work.

[alsoknownas1]

At 5/17/23 11:28 AM, Mabelma wrote:                                           

This is a really neat tool! Great work on the development, I think one extra nice function would be to be able to play music from the NG portal while you're reading the comic so it doesn't feel so silent but other than that, really nice work.

Thanks!

It would be pretty easy to add one track as a gimmick (and if we do that at some point, I'll share the code). It's a really great suggestion because the way the viewer works means it would be easy to tie music/narration to a particular page.

Doing it right though...

The two main issues are

1. if it's anything but a gimmick I'd want some kind of playback controls in the viewer
2. finding a way to keep the drag and drop simplicity on the authoring side

There's a lot of features that require a modal UI, so it's definitely something we're thinking about. Probably for a version 2.0 though, honestly.

Still, like I said, it could be done badly pretty easily. When we post the viewer on Github, I might include some patches for that and some of our other gimmicks like animation and trophies.

[Mabelma]

At 5/17/23 09:04 PM, alsoknownas1 wrote: At 5/17/23 11:28 AM, Mabelma wrote:                                           

This is a really neat tool! Great work on the development, I think one extra nice function would be to be able to play music from the NG portal while you're reading the comic so it doesn't feel so silent but other than that, really nice work.

Thanks!

It would be pretty easy to add one track as a gimmick (and if we do that at some point, I'll share the code). It's a really great suggestion because the way the viewer works means it would be easy to tie music/narration to a particular page.

Doing it right though...

The two main issues are

There's a lot of features that require a modal UI, so it's definitely something we're thinking about. Probably for a version 2.0 though, honestly.

Still, like I said, it could be done badly pretty easily. When we post the viewer on Github, I might include some patches for that and some of our other gimmicks like animation and trophies.

Animations would be great as well. Definitely excited to see this keep growing and expanding. It is a very good tool.

[Tenebrare]

Is this faith? As i was looking for a platform, where to post the little comic I am working currently. Not that i am anywhere near posting anything from it, but it is surprisingly hard to find a place with open mind and solid structure - where to post works that might (or might not) contain something else than family friendly public rating.

So I am intrigued and curious about this feature and how it is going to pan out.

[BaconBob9000]

The wizard itself will walk you through the entire process, but basically you number your pages, put them in a folder with your comics title, and drag and drop. The utility then let's you download a zip file that's ready to upload.                                   

sounds great

[TwisterzX0]

Oh man. I have plans on making a big webcomic I’m doin, I don’t know wether if I post it on Webtoon or Tapas. (Leaning o

towards Webtoon) This seems interesting though!

[PlayingPS2]

This is so cool!! Awesome work!

[alsoknownas1]

At 5/18/23 03:49 PM, TheBrickishere wrote: Oh man. I have plans on making a big webcomic I’m doin, I don’t know wether if I post it on Webtoon or Tapas. (Leaning o
towards Webtoon) This seems interesting though!

Thanks! Also... why not all of them? :)

Seriously though, one of the ways we imagined this being used is for "collections" (not everyone does the insane big updates of @kittyhawkmontrose ).