It's finally here!

Just in time for Friday!

The Electric Zine Maker now has two templates to choose from. You can start with the classic 8-page fold OR...

*Musical escalation*

*Drums*

*Orchestra*

*Foreboding piano*

*Enthusiasm*

The square accordion zine! Which makes these adorable tiny booklets.

This one is a bit harder to fold. Instructions are included, including a video in the HOW TO FOLD section of the UI.
Instructions for it are also printed, or included when you publish your zine. This should make sharing it with people easier since they have easy access to a how-to-fold guide.

Adding new templates is a fairly involved thing to do. As it turns out, printing is complicated!
There are so many varieties of printers, and so many varieties of paper, it's difficult to predict issues.
The Electric Zine Maker's intent is to make that AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE (sorry for shouting, but I'm excited about this :)
This new template prints on BOTH sides of the paper. It's a double facing print.
When you print from the Electric Zine Maker it will guide you through printing on the front, then it gives you a little window prompting you to turn the page around so you can print on the back.

Since printers vary so much, printing on the back may take some trial and error... there are a couple suggestions included with the page that show you what way the page should face.

This is the start of a lot of templates that will be added.

The UI programming had to go through an overhaul since it was hardcoded for just one template. This is a pretty big update for that reason.
Adding new templates after this should be easier. I'm going to start with anything that involves a single sheet of paper.
When I have a number of these, I'll be adding Quarter Size Zines (here's a nice guide for what those are)
...So yeah. That was A LOT.
More to come!

I tried my best to test this. I got all the bugs I'm aware of. There should not be problems, but of course if you run into them let me know.

When adding templates I basically have to make a unique layout for each type of paper (US Letter, A4). The dimensions are different for all of them.
I updated a lot of the code to account for that. I really hope there won't be problems because of all the changes.

...Ok, so this devlog is a pretty short one. It's Friday. I'm tired, and my parrot is yelling my name trying to summon me so... I gotta go xD
I'll probably write a longer blog post talking about all the technical things later... since it's fun to talk about all the problems solved...

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Here are some other dev notes for what's new:

* "Special thanks..." area added
I added a "Special thanks to..." area to the bootup screen where I can thank people.
Jeremy Oduber has done amazing work in supporting, and building on, the HTML5 templates for the Electric Zine Maker. He even made an update to it so it supports the new template type!
I think this project is amazing. A lot of people use it when sharing their zines.
So... thank you for that!!

* New Feature: Electric Zine Maker Gallery!
https://itch.io/c/1041007/made-in-the-electric-zine-maker
In the new start window, where you select your zines, there's a button that takes you to an itch gallery of zines made in the Electric Zine Maker. If you make one, let me know! I'll add it to that collection.

* Bug fix: .jpeg is supported as an importable image type. (not just .jpg but .jpeg, the "e" is not silent)

* Bug fix: Cleaner filenames!
When you save a zine as pdf or image, the filename used to maintain the long date number format, even if you put in your own custom filename in the Zine Name field...
This is fixed now! Zines are exported as your chosen Zine name. If a name is not set, THEN it reverts back to the numbers and date format...
The TYPE of thing that is being exported (Booket, USLetter, A4) is prepended to the filename so you can keep types separate.

Bug fix: There have been optimizations done. In general. You will likely not notice any changes tho.

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Also! Recently IndieCade hosted an Electric Zine Jam. I wrote about all the beautiful entries from that event here: http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/all-the-beautiful-zines-from-the-first-e...
I'll be hosting another one soon, and will announce that here + over Twitter. I figure I'll wait to see what breaks for people first. It's a fresh update after all...

On another note... I gave this talk at A MAZE where we built "The Final Flash Game"... as the title suggests one last silly Flash game. I took suggestions from the crowd and built whatever they told me to make. The talk starts at 6:22:41...

It was a lot of fun. My favorite is the moderator laugh attack. xD

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Yay! Go make some zines! If you post them on Twitter @ alienmelon and I'll share them too!