From: Don Hopkins [mailto:xardox@mindspring.com] 
Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2000 12:59 PM
To: SimWatch@egroups.com
Cc: scott@scottmccloud.com; Don Hopkins; willw@emf.net
Subject: [SimWatch] Making comic books from The Sims photo albums

Several people have posted some great ideas about improving The Sims
photo album for telling stories -- please keep sending them in!

What kinds of problems do you have with the current scrapbook design,
what features are missing, and how would you like it to work?

What other programs have you seen or used, that have easy to use
features that could improve on The Sims scrapbook?

I am in the research and design stages of creating a stand-alone
utility that will help you produce comic books from The Sims photo
album. It will let you rearranging and edit the images and captions,
and then overlay graphics, speech balloons, thought bubbles and
captions over the images, to put words into the Sims' mouths and help
you tell stories!

Most important and interesting to me are suggestions from people who
have tried to use the current photo album to tell stories, but have
been frustrated and want something better.

Scott McCloud's wonderful comic book about comics "Understanding
Comic" was quite influential on the design of The Sims.

There are some well used dog-eared copies of it sitting around the
office at Maxis.

His long awaited sequal "Reinventing Comics" was just recently
published, and it's extremely interesting and applicable to The Sims.

I would like to apply some of the ideas in both of those books to The
Sims, so you can easily tell stories by making comic books and
printing them on a color printer to share with your family and
friends!

Check out his web page at:
http://www.scottmccloud.com

    -Don