Adventure Snack

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Summary

Geoffrey Golden is a writer for gaming companies who since 2019, has published Adventure Snack, a "Choose Your Own Adventure” fiction magazine. I developed an open-source publishing platform called Winky with story templates, custom features, and improved performance and maintainability.

Features

Winky was adapted from another product by Inkle Studios, allowing one to:

  • Load, save, and restart stories
  • Style paragraphs
  • Switch between light and dark themes

Enhancements

  • Better color contrast to reduce eye strain
  • Pleasant to read on any size phone, tablet, or monitor

New features

  • Writers can add styles to images and choices
  • Settings file for easier adjusting fonts, colors, and more

Tech / Design

App:

  • Inky

Code:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • PHP

Testing:

  • Sizzy

Project Links

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Process

Adventure Snack uses Substack for email updates and introductory story pages. Initially, a story's subsequent pages were published with WordPress. I modified a header template to display content at its original size and added design rules for different screen sizes. Then during testing, adjustments were made using an emulator for mobile, tablet, and large screens.

A few years later, Geoffrey started writing stories and exporting them to web files using the Inky editor software. I was asked to duplicate the previous web design, investigate a few display-related bugs, and add a few features.

I cleaned up the codebase, removed performance bottlenecks, and made a new build process with code splitting. Adventure Snack fonts were used and the styling instructions were first normalized, then loaded using a settings file (CSS variables) for easy future customization.

The ability to style images and story choices was added along with a zoom-in header animation and multi-screen web design. Geoffrey was advised on changes and could test drive the new web template using a story hosted via GitHub pages. Documentation was provided and the template was open-sourced.