Stats: Updates happen on average every 23.3 days. Recently they’ve happened 72.3 days apart. Last update happened 3718.6 days ago... Ahem, I am probably very sorry stuff is late. I suspect I may have a good reason for it. Twitter or Tumblr may know more... Also, check out stats over time.
Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a thing by a dude, who’s all like, “I’M GONNA MAKE A THING.” And then he did. Or is doing. Or, you know, whatever. This dude can be found on the internet. He makes adventurous haute couture bespoke graceful exciting internets for a living. Hire him to make you one.
If you’re on a crappy internet connection, my condolences. Even though 1MB per panel gives me nightmares, there is no way for me to make the thing I want to make if I compress the assets further. I’m sorry! Open the page and walk the dog while it loads.
If the music refuses to play, whitelist this site in any Flash blockers you may have running.
If you’re visiting on an iPad or iPhone or Android or mobile whatever, don’t. Mobile browsers in general are a can of worms which I have tried and failed to solve time and again at great expense of effort to no result and I give up. Maybe I’ll make native special edition versions for mobile when I’m done. Ideas for dev environments welcomed. Löve looks nice.
I am also aware that I am “doing it wrong”, that its “janky as hell” and “bad for usability” and that hot conventional wisdom says I should be using css transforms and not left and top positioning. I tried to retrofit velocity into the code and it broke so many things that I wasn’t worth my time to go through and rebuild all the special effects from scratch. The main reason these sexy new ways of harnesing the GPU don’t work for Hobo Lobo are the many z-index cutenesses that send further-back things over the nearer ones as things scroll around—walls in faux-perspective do that—and these methods freeze animating containers into single z-level chunks. I really have to throw out how the primary parallax is animated to make it work, and that would just increase the jankiness exponentially. So, again, to hell with that. It looks just fine if you have enough ram and it looks ok if you don’t. If I didn’t have a high tollerance for jankiness, I would have stayed clear of the heirs of SGML & ECMA.
If you are encountering weird bugs, please send them my way. If any other optimizations and tweaks that could make the site work better pop into your mind, please share them.
I consider the front end code to fall under the Creative Commons badge found at the bottom of the page. If you want to make another comic/storybook/thing that works this way, you are free to as long as you give me a shout out. Note that this blanket permit only applies to narrative/creative uses. If you want to use this structure for commercial ventures, you’ll have to talk to me.
Read my tutorial to get a better idea of how stuff works under the hood. You can grab the demo files from it and use them as a starting point. Make sure to comment out helper lines in parallaxer.js before you start production (they are guilty of replacing the content of panels with the panel’s width). Since that tutorial was written many refactorings of code ago, it might be a good idea to grab the freshest parallaxer.js and retrofit it into the demo files. The tutorial also contains a crash course on turning pencil drawings into transparent-background assets.
If you also want the back end that powers the whole dealio (it needs PHP & MySQL), inquire within. I am leaning towards asking for a nominal sum of some sort, just to weed out people who will waste my time. I may be willing to not ask for said nominal sum if I like your project. Some knowledge of basic HTML and CSS layout techniques is a must. Check out what the admin layer looks like in action.
Harmonica piece on page 3 was composed and performed by Michael Rubin. It was produced by Dan Boillot. The ambiance is composed of sounds from The Free Sound Project, specifically this one with a touch of this and this.
Banjo, Violin & Percussion piece on page 7 was composed and performed by Jeremiah Teutsch with laughing children and extra effects from The Free Sound Project.
The bird on page 3 was drawn and animated by Lety RZ.
Devils on page 7 were animated by Jen Montes.
The crystal ball on page 1 is composed of veggies and fruits from Inside Insides.
Made in Photoshop CS3 & CS5. Images optimized further with ImageAlpha and ImageOptim. Range Serif is the typeface. Hosted in a LAMP. Though Dreamhost allegedly gives me unlimited bandwidth, I dunno if this is practically true. Let’s find out!
Made in Texas.
Almost everything here is made by a Stevan Živadinović