Making a BOOK category App - Specifically a Comic "Graphic Novel"

FranzKeller

I did a webcomic a while ago, all about this whale that you see by my signature.

I notice there is much activity on the App store in the "Books" category,
and I realized -

I could publish the whole series ( 60 pages! ) as an app, and make this in GS.

In order to do this, I would like to do "pan and zoom" functionality, like they have
on the "bigtime" apps like Marvel Comics, and some anime publishers.

Any template, tutorial, design suggestions?

Are any of the rest of you authors, of comix, picture books? etc.

;-)

keweworkshop

I have a children's book published on the app store. I have also considered doing a comic book, with the zooming like in a real comic book. I have a friend who has published a comic book and I had considered asking him if he would like to make it into an app. But it has only gotten as far as my brain. I don't know if there is any templates or tutorials on it. I have never seen any. It would be super cool though! At least it is in my brain

FranzKeller

What is your app title, if I may ask?

I know I could just pay T-Shirt Booth to write it? ;-) But the more I can figure out in small steps, the more satisfying the victory?

I figure to have each page of the comic as an "actor", and control their motion ( and resize / zooming ) with clever scripting?

I want iPhone people to be able to read my work also, so they'd zoom in to read the text
of each panel.

BUT I'd like the few iPad owners to be able to see the pages as entire ... pages?
As they were originally intended.

keweworkshop

It's Seedonia. I will be releasing an update and a deluxe version soon.

You could pay someone to do it but if you want to make more than this one app you will need to know to use GameSalad. You could always hire someone as a tutor to teach and help you build it.

I have each page as a scene. With a comic book you could have each page as a scene as well and have each panel of the comic it's own actor.

DBA has a free children's book template you can download on their site. It is pretty nifty, the whole book is one scene but I guess gamesalad can't handle the memory. But you can download it for free and learn some things in there.

http://www.deepblueapps.com/Deep_Blue_Ideas_Ltd./Bargains.html

Photics

FranzKeller said:
Are any of the rest of you authors

I made a comic book with GameSalad... http://photics.com/bot-1 ...but I'm not sure if I would do it again. There are some issues. Primarily, GameSalad does not support universal binaries.

FranzKeller

I'm not an expert yet, but have published two apps with it. ;-) SO much more to learn though.
(and so many good ideas! when I can figure the code to produce them.)

Thank you for the tip, I will check out the template.

Photics -
Yeah, it would be good to have it as a universal binary!
Maybe I should just wait until they improve GS to include that? ( and wait, wait... ;-)

Or maybe I'll just keep making ALL my Apps at iPhone 3 resoultion,
as I have been? Just easier that way...

I still am frustrated that the miniscule difference in res between iPad and Retina makes us do an entirely different set of apps? But that was Apples' choice, I guess.

App Surge

I believe that Darren from Deep Blue Apps has a free book template...