Greetings and welcome to June’s edition of OPORD! We’re cutting it close this month, but we still made it! June has been an interesting month for us here, so let’s take a look at what’s been going on behind the scenes.
Content Hiatus Reminder
First and foremost we’d like to remind everyone that the lack of new story content this month is completely intentional. We are not falling behind or skipping out on update commitments – this was a pre-planned break while our artist visited friends and family in Missouri. He returns this week and we’ll be picking up work on AH ASAP. Every page takes about two weeks to make, so expect the next update in roughly two weeks! I have already storyboarded the next two pages and am working on a buffer of more, so Brian will have everything he needs to get right at it upon his return.
Formatting Bug Fixes
While we don’t have any new content for June, I have taken the breather to go back and finally fix some lingering formatting issues that have been bugging me ever since we started. You may or may not have noticed them yourselves, but hopefully AH is now a smoother reading experience for new and old readers alike. The fixes we made are:
- Increased the font on Pages 5 & 6. I don’t know why it was smaller than the rest of our material to begin with, but this has been fixed. This should hopefully make you strain your eyes much less when reading those pages.
- Re-positioned one of Eleni Greco’s speech bubbles at the bottom of Page 4 in order to improve the dialogue flow. It wasn’t intuitively obvious that her lines were supposed to be read between Tarek’s first and second bubbles, so this should help eliminate any confusion.
- I don’t know if others were having this problem, but unless I was zoomed into the Archive page a bit, it would look like there was a blank space or a missing image in the thumbnail lineups of our pages. This was not only visually unappealing, but it could lead to the mistaken impression that there was a page missing from our archive. I’ve now fixed this and everything lines up properly.
Is there anything we missed? If you’re having any weird formatting issues or just have some complaints, don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments or by emailing us, and we’ll do our best to fix them! We hope that this makes the overall AH reading experience much more smooth and enjoyable for everyone.
Social Media Bias
Finally, we’re continuing to expand our social media presence! Aeolian Hope now has a Twitter account that you can follow to get more frequent updates and info on our progress (Don’t forget to Like us on Facebook as well!).
We also just signed up on Comic Rocket. Comic Rocket is a webcomic database like the others we’re on, but it’s got a TON of really cool extra features built in, such as the ability to make yourself a reading list that bookmarks your progress in each comic so that you can pick up where you left off the next time you visit. It’s a fantastic ‘one-stop-shop’ setup, so do yourself a favor and head over to Rocket Comic – start building your own personal webcomic reading library!
Finally, Aeolian Hope is in the process of strengthening its relationship with the Halo Archive – one of the best Halo community sites on the web, hands-down. We’ve been posting Aeolian Hope updates in their forums since before we even published our first content here. Now we’ll be posting our new pages on their blog as an affiliate when they come out. This will help generate more content for the Archive’s already-impressive blog, and will help increase visibility and exposure for our story among the Halo fan community. We’re very excited for this new partnership!
Wrapping Up
Well that’s about it for now! Sorry again for the lack of story content this month, but as you can see we’ve been keeping busy improving Aeolian Hope in a number of different ways. We didn’t have time to get to a Featured Fan Project this month, so The Fallen: A Halo Fan Film will remain in the spotlight until next month’s OPORD. We’ll be back soon with Page 16 and much more, so stay tuned!
– Aubrey
Aeolian Hope 