Add proper support for storylines

[ilyvion]

In the system, they currently exist as equivalent to cast and locations, but I'm not sure this is necessarily the way to go. Certainly not with how to visually display them in the browser. When you are looking at comic #N, I want to show all storylines that were on-going at that time, even when they're not actively featured in the comic.

I also want to display a kind of "progress bar" of the storyline in its view mode. Here's a quick mockup of what that might look like:

Here's the intended reading of that "progress bar:"

• The lighter color shows "what we've seen of the story so far"
• The regular color shows what part of the story we have yet to see where the story is featured in the comic timeline.
• The dimmer color shows where the story is still on-going, but isn't featured in the comic timeline.
  With that in mind, the way to read that progress bar, then, is as follows: We're ~5/13 of the way into the "Marigold" storyline and after reading ~2/13 more of the storyline, there'll be an about ~2/13 duration where the storyline isn't actively present in the comic timeline, before it returns for another ~4/13 duration before ending.

For stories that don't have an end yet, the bar wouldn't "go back up" at the end and the storyline would keep showing all the way to the last comic, which might look like this:

I'm open to better/different ideas here, of course.

[phuzion]

I like the idea as a concept, but I am afraid that this would be slightly undiscoverable or at least not self-explanatory to users. I'm guessing that the ? icon will show a modal dialog box that explains everything?

Perhaps an additional useful feature would be to include one bar of a highly contrasting color that indicates where exactly we are in relation to the story line (based on the current comic number). This would clearly indicate to users "You are here". Perhaps only show such an indicator in storylines that are in the current comic.

How do you intend to handle storylines that have massive breaks of say hundreds of comics, but do actually pick back up? Take a storyline that exists for 20 comics, and then takes a break for 200 comics, and then resumes for another 20 comics, with the reader in the middle of the first 20 comics. Would the user's experience be a bar that is 7% white, 7% normal color, 70% dark, and then another 15% normal color? Or should that 70% be proportionally scaled down so as not to take over the entire progress bar?

[ilyvion]

The ? icon is for going to a random comic in the story; same as how it works for characters and items. (If you don't see one, it's because it's not on by default, but you should have a setting for it.)

I like the idea of showing a marker for where in the story we are rather than highlighting everything up until where we are.

I see what you're saying about the experience possibly being less than stellar with stories having short, infrequent appearances. Maybe better than making it proportional, would be to show some kind of marker where the gaps are? Something like this?

This is just a mock-up, but I've made it so it should be more clear where you are currently at, as well as a small marker that there's discontinuity in the story. I'd probably pick a more visible symbol or whatever, but I was inspired by the "discontinuity" marker you sometimes see on axes on graphs:

Now obviously, we couldn't display the marker each time there's a small discontinuity, otherwise stories take place in every few comics over a long time would get a lot of them, so they'd be mainly to indicate a large gap.