Working on a free Amiga book

[TheDrisk]

Hi all, I have picked up again a project I was doing to do an Amiga book covering all the games... I appreciate Amiga HOL, Lemon Amiga and Moby Games do this already, but my idea was to pool all those fantastic digital resources together into something reminiscent of the Amiga Power game lists, but with links to the magazines etc and videos of you tube sites playing the games... and HOL and Lemon stores of the game manuals. I think I have found a nice balance between efficient use of page space and information, to make it an enjoyable read.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1osY...ew?usp=sharing

Anyway its very much a WIP with the game reviews itself currently starts on Page 62... The history and intro was lifted from another free book I did years ago and so at some point I will tidy it up this section. But I thought it would be fun to share my progress and offer out if any like minded souls wanted to help share the load by taking on a letter of games etc. Certainly would appreciate any help or constructive opinions.

As I do progress I will update the same link above so you can see it slowly progress.

Enjoy

[Korodny]

Some first impressions:

You're nuts. But you seem to be vaguely aware if it, so... my condolences?

Don't try to do everything at once. An A-Z games guide preview with 114 pages, where the first ~65 pages are anything but game reviews (Amiga history, Amiga models, game bundles)?

Weird paper size. Page margins are way to small

Single column text on something about the size of an A4 page is not a good idea (introduction, history...). Neither is five columns in the games section.

The box scans for every game are too much IMHO. Make the layout look crowded, and they're way to small to be useful anyway.

[hitm4n]

Are you keeping it digital and free? Otherwise, i would suggest much the same as Korodny. I applaud the effort on this, a huge undertaking...

4 Columns in an A4 book is the max, 5 won't print or read well. Games should be 3 columns if going for an A5 format.

The single column blocks of text within the first 62 pages, i think you can do 2 columns here, otherwise i like the machine rundown and the original advert scans etc.

So, 2 columns for first part of book, 4 for the games.

I also feel that you could automate a massive amount of this if you are lifting reviews from online. A lot of copy and pasting into a spreadsheet, you can almost build the book pages simply by listing it in 4 columns. Title, Pic, Review, Scores etc.

Even better still, you should contact the owners of the sites you are getting the reviews and info from and ask for a copy of their databases, citing this project. Most of the guys running these sites are retro/emulation hobbyists like the rest of us, and keen to help out on projects like this. Then you can build the book in super quick time.

Once you have a book, one huge tome of knowledge, you can break it down into managable printable volumes. Start a kickstarter, get the money in and sell this bad boy. Bobs your monkey pot seabass funky trousers.

Good luck. Keep us updated, i'm liking the idea.

[eXeler0]

Wow.
Very impressive undertaking :-0
Agreeing with hitman about the automation part, its probably doable.

[TheDrisk]

Thanks all for the kind feedback... The reviews are all my own as opposed from pulled from other sites... with me using HOL, Moby primarily to link to their websites for clicking on the review percentage to see a scan of the full screenshot.. or L link to link to a video someone has done showing the game or M for manual scans on HOL or Lemon... but I could consider trying to automate this part a little.

Its built to only be free and digital, as opposed to be printable... The reason for 5 columns was I was trying to recreate the back of Amiga Power look and feel (https://amr.abime.net/issue_50_pages), but that was a wider page than A4 and so was 6 columns. I left it A4 in case someone wanted to print it, its easier to do.

If anyone on here is a HOL administrator, then it would be handy if I could access the box art images without the HOL watermark, as Moby Games and Games FAQ don't have them all.

As mentioned its one I will slowly work my way through...talking years probably ha ha... but if anyone wanted to join in on the madness then more than happy to collaborate on this mad project.

[Dastardly]

I agree with a lot of the comments above re the layout. If you’re going to put this much effort into this, which is admirable, you should check out some graphic design basics. Your projects will benefit enormously and look as good as they deserve to.

[gimbal]

Yeah or probably use some kind of desktop publishing tooling... they're designed to make that process a little more automatic. What works for a magazine works for a PDF too.

[TheDrisk]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Yeah or probably use some kind of desktop publishing tooling... they're designed to make that process a little more automatic. What works for a magazine works for a PDF too.

Is there any one anyone recommends? As I am using Powerpoint presently ha ha

[Matt_H]

If you don't want to spend huge money for the big guns of InDesign, there's the cheaper Affinity Publisher and the open-source Scribus. But even MS Word can be a decent DTP layout program if you learn the tricks to fight it into submission.

[Korodny]

I read through it some more. I actually enjoy the format, nice for quickly scanning a lot of games and checking if there's something new to me that looks interesting or getting reminded of an old favorite I really should try out again.

But there's still way too much problems:

Typos, missing words or even partial sentences, lack of proofreading ("The controls as default are horrible on default"), some games (Asterix, IIRC) have no screenshot, paragraph alignment changes from justification to left aligned whenever text is displayed next to a cover scan, there's no hyphenation (modern tools will automate that for you), column width and/or line length is constantly changing etc. etc.

You haven't even covered 10% of the games, and you're already getting sloppy. That's a sure sign you either aren't nuts enough for the job or you chose the wrong tools. Powerpoint? Holy shit.

Stop what you're doing, and spend some time getting a proper toolchain set up and making yourself familiar with it. A word processor or DTP solution (Scribus is free) are much, much better for this. Personally, I'd drop WYSIWYG and use Markdown instead, then use pandoc to convert that into a nice looking PDF. But that's a bit of a learning curve.

Stick to a standard format for each game (Headline, publisher/year, links to external ressources, one screenshot, quick review, magazine scores) because that makes reading easier and minimizes the risk of making mistakes. Use a standard page size. Create each chapter - i.e. letter - as a separate chapter, then combine the resulting PDFs into the finished book only after everything is done.

[fxgogo]

All really valid comments. You definitely need to get the workflow right. My input would be to get the type size down. It is way large right now. The other area that needs a lot of improvement is images. It looks like you are cutting and pasting from the web right now. Some of those images are really ropey. Screenshots can easily be done by you or if you get permission from HOL or Lemon Amiga to use theirs. As for the others, do you have rights to use them? The cutouts need to be done by hand in a proper art package.

Lastly, keep it simple. The biggest mistake I see with passion projects is ‘too much bling’. Tone it down and you will find it more impactful.

[alexh]

Looks very good. Thanks for all your hard work

[fxgogo]

Yes, I have to agree and sorry for not saying that in my above post. Good job and I think everyone is keen to see this project grow, hence all the feedback.