Release 0.1 - 16 January 2025
The Electronic Literature Conference is this July! And the deadline for submissions is today. With that in mind, I'm finally releasing an early version of Scroll Cinema and submitting a related workshop proposal for the conference this summer.
Scroll Cinema is a long time coming. I first released A Modern Ghost in 2017 using Unity, in which I hardcoded all of the animations just to get the prototype working. I spent the next couple of years working on a more flexible system, which culminated in the first version of Scroll Cinema for Unity.
However, that version of the tools depends on closed source packages, much to my chagrin, and I've been unable to release them publicly. I then tried making another version for Cocos Creator — but due to limitations in Cocos's UI, that version has been very difficult to use.
So after researching many game engines and exhausting other options, and frankly becoming tired of compromising on Scroll Cinema's user experience in order to use off-the-shelf infrastructure, I decided to roll up my sleeves and build a public version of Scroll Cinema from scratch.
There's still a long way to go to reach feature parity with the Unity version, but I'm well on the way! This first v0.1 version of Scroll Cinema for web is a proof of concept that allows you to create text and images, and animate their positions and opacities.
Altogether, notable features of this version include...
- The basic editor interface
- Basic text and image creation
- The ability to put those nodes in groups
- Animation track and clip creation
- Manipulating node positioning
Anyway, I'm excited to be taking this big step towards empowering folks to create visually captivating e-lit. Please come chat on Discord! I'd love to get your feedback and talk about all things related to scroll-driven content :D
-Artemio