Episode 265 - Drunk Duck updates and the future
Apr 4, 2016
For Quackcast 265 I wanted to steer the direction toward the idea of future fixes and features for Drunk Duck! We talked a bit about the 2nd wave of fixes that will be happening now- HippieVan worked to gather people's suggestions for the most important bugs that needed fixing (with our limited funds), and features people want added, and then did a survey to find what people though were the highest priority. It was a lot of work and took a few weeks to come up with the results. Bellow is a summery of what she learned:
Topics and Show Notes
Top results in bug fixes:
- Numerous issues with pre-uploaded comics – 61%, 14.5 points
- When browsing the “comics” tab, the first page of comics is listed by rank, after which it switches to alphabetical. – 32%, 6.5 points
- Multiple page/bulk uploader sometimes ends up with pages out of order. – 25%, 4.5 points
Top results in new features:
- A reply feature for comic comments. – 21%, 5.5 points
- Improve the comic search function – 21%, 4.5 points
- Add the option to choose the exact time/hour when pre-uploading comic pages. – 21%, 4 points
- Active/On Hiatus/Complete tags for comics – 18%, 4.5 points
- More options/more customization for page layout – 21%, 3.5 points
“Specific results aside, it looks to me like the main issues people are concerned with generally are: pre-uploaded comics, dealing with comments, and browsing via the ”comics“ tab. Issues concerning the front page were surprisingly not in any of the top results - I suspect partly because most of the survey-takers are heavy users who don't rely on the front page as much as newer/more casual users.”
Though in all we had about 17 bugs on the list that people wanted fixing. I put all the priority ones at the top of the list but also kept the rest on there because I'd prefer bugs are fixed no matter what. Unfortunately when I gave that list to Alexey, our programmer he said that just fixing all the bugs would eat up most of the budget with very little left over for features (which are a lot more complicated to work on). I might ask him to drop some of the bugs in favour of a couple of the features though because that's really what people would prefer to see added to the site: something new, visible, a tangible benefit.
On that subject though we would REALLY love to get into planning for the future features for DD! The sorts of things we're talking about for THAT are BIG changes: like changing the front page to modernise it; choosing a better colour scheme; having a really useful notification area for DD members that have all your info, notifications, favourites, PQs, comic comments and reply comments all in one single place so you can manage all that easily and naturally in one go-for ALL of that we need our DD community to decide what the want out of that stuff and to help design it, not have the designs just forced on them as in the past.
Above all we want to capitalise on the two things that make DD stand out above the pack: Our focus on community, and our oddball reputation as a site that welcomes and promotes the diverse and the weird, we are truly DRUNK DUCK, not really some corporate, slick “The Duck Webcomics”. We don't all think in the same way as they seem to on some comic sites, our artists don't work in the same styles; there's a slightly grungy, irreverent, off-centeredness that has always characterised the essence of DD and we'd like to reflect that in any redesign.
You can also still donate to our Indiegogo to help us with these future developments!
Gunwallace gave us a lovely track for the comic Wounds!
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Undead 20XX - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Undead_20XX/
Donate to our Indiegogo - http://igg.me/at/DrunkDuck
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Kawaiidaigakusei - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Pitface - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Featured music:
Wounds http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Wounds/, by caleb131, rated M.
- See more at: http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2016/apr/04/quackcast-265-drunk-duck-updates-and-the-future/
Episode 263 - WHY do a webcomic?
Mar 21, 2016
Why do you do the kind of webcomic you do? Why? Why? WRRRRRRRRHHHHYYYYY? This was the question asked by Genejoke, one of our favourite DDers. This jolly gent asked a whole possy of posers related to that subject and I thought that it provoked some interesting responses, and so it became fodder ad a half for Quackcast 263. Banes, myself, Pitface and Tantz Aerine all approach the questions ourselves and then hand the floor over to our DD contributors, so to speak. I find that it's really important to be able to come up with answers to questions like these, and even more interesting is just how those answers change depending on when you ask them. I find that these days I have a MUCH better idea of why I do my comics and why I make the creative choices that I do.
Episode 255 - Drunk Duck Improvement Drive
Jan 25, 2016
We're trying to fix up Drunk Duck, adding the the comic statistics back in, fixing forums, adding notifications to PQs and MORE, but we need money to do it. In this Quackcast, Ozoneocean, Banes, and Pitface talk about the improvements we want to have on DD, and what YOU can do to help us out. Please consider donating to our Indiegogo fund-raising drive to help us pay our programmer: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/drunk-duck-webcomics-improvement-drive/x/4410947#/ There are a LOT of cool perks you can have including your own Quackcast interview all about YOU, original art from The creator of Modest Medusa, Charby the Vampirate and others, a 126 page Modest Medusa comic for only $10 and much more! If you can't spare any change, please consider spreading the word to your readers. Remember, these fixes are for everyone, by donating to DD you're helping yourself. :D
Episode 245 - fiction influencing reality and the myth of the friendzone
Nov 16, 2015
In Quackcast 245 we TRY to talk about my idea that fictional characters, stereotypes, tropes and situations in media have influenced their counterparts in reality, and in a lot of ways helped to create them. Fictional stereotypes and tropes are made out of simplified models of things that happen in reality, usually by pulling together all the most dramatic, big, bold versions and then turning them up to 11 to make a new, more exciting fictional caricature, that NEW image is then spread far and wide and influences people to imitate it- a good example being the modern “cowboy”. This idea was kicked off by Pitface suggesting one of my characters looked like a douchey friendzoned character. I thought about it and realised that a real life version of this character (who's mooning over a girl in a relationship with another guy), WOULD be exactly as she described, also those characters are common to relationship comedies and so often friendzoned… SO that got me thinking: could the current crop of “nice guy” fedora friendzone exponents have based their crazy theories about relationships on images in the media? -since they don't have much relationship to reality yet they so closely match pre-existing tropes in movies and TV shows. Then we expanded the idea to other examples of media representations influencing reality. Pitface, Banes, and Tantz Aerine join me on the Quackcast. Gunwallace does a lovely theme for Entanglement.
Episode 236 - The Songcast/Drunkcast
Sep 14, 2015
Pitface, Banes, Tantz Aerine and Ozoneocean reunited for a repeat of the legendary Drunkcast of Quackcast 137! Almost exactly 100 Quackcasts later we hit the booze again, but this time we had a goal to pursue with our drunken ramblings: music. We decided to talk about what themes inspire our comics, inspire us and represent our comic characters… and we came up with a LOT, too bloody much for me to link to dammit! We've also included all the links to the Quackcasts where themes for our comics appeared, AND Gunwallace has done the theme to Putrid Meat so it means ALL our comics have themes now!!! So enjoy our silly drunken chatting, this is who Drunk Duck Quackcasts are SUPPOSED to be!
Episode 234 - Climactic Climaxes!
Aug 31, 2015
What's best? One big climax, multiple small ones, early, or delayed? How much should you work UP to a climax? What about anticlmactic events, how important are they? Climaxes are really important in stories. Often you work up to them over the course of a whole series, but each episode or chapter can have them, maybe even every single page. I find writing “up” to climaxes a bit stressful because you have a lot of preasure and expectation there. And when it's over and you've actually achieved it, it can be a bit depressing: where do you go to from there? You can feel a little lost, at least I do. TALKING ABOUT WRITING HERE. My preference is for multiple climaxes. Do you always need climaxes in stories? I don't think you do personally… there are times when things work fine without one, but it does help better with endings. Sometimes climaxes can be TOO big. Way too much of a story can be invested in a climax, it subsumes everything, everything has to tie in with that specific story flow and that can be REALLY had to pull off. If it's not done right it can be massively disappointing. Anticlimactic. Pitface Joins Banes and Ozone to chat about climaxes in stories and read out the contributions from our climactic contributors. Gunwallace gave us a gorgeous theme for Just Another Day!
Episode 232 - Creating a Rounded World
Aug 17, 2015
Hello, hello, hello! This is the second part of our hugely long expose on the tricky art of WORLD BUILDING! And it really IS extra loooooooooooog… that's because we take so much time crafting the Quackcast world for you. To recap: world-building is a big part of ALL fiction from SciFi and fantasy to your common or garden police shows or even comic strips. You create locations that have relationships with each other, characters that have jobs, families, friends, histories etc, all that is just as much world building as a fantasy world with a specific style of magic and monsters or a SciFi world with aliens and a 1000 year war. Typically, if you do your homework and set up your world nicely then it makes it easier to write stories within it, but you also have to remember not to show all that research to people in the form of big long explanations. Banes and Bravo1102 join Ozoneocean to talk about it! Listen to Gunwallace's lovely theme for Regarding Dandelions!
Episode 231 - The importance of world building
Aug 9, 2015
You always do a bit of world building in fiction, in some types of stories like alternative histories, fantasy and Sci-Fi you have to do a bit more, in things set in the real world you don't have to do nearly as much - maybe only limited to a few rooms, character occupations and relationships etc, rather than planets and political systems, but the point is you're always doing it. There are good ways to do world building and bad ways i.e. work out as many details as you need to but have that all behind the scenes, not introduced as a wall of text or long explanations on how things work. World building should inform you story and make it work seamlessly, not prop it up like a rickety scaffold. The topic of the importance of World Building was previously touched on a few years ago by Skoolmunkee and Kroatz for Quackcast 39, but things happened at that recording was lost to history, so now we approach it again with all new contributions, strident opinions, and points of view on the subject. Gunwallace did a cool theme for Red Velvet Requiem!
