90's Resort is a Magical Renegades spin-off that celebrates the Old Web experience and aesthetics!
It adapts most of the material from the Magical Renegades supplementary material blog Record Compendium, but in the style of the Old Web! It should have less overhead so it should load better on older computers and OSes. A Neocities site is also a more fitting to host pieces of pixel art and 3D renders!
Don't mind the Under Construction signs! This site has been built onto since its launch, but there's a construction site left here on purpose as an homage to those Under Construction pages from the old web!
*ahem* On with the tour!
The aesthetics and the customizability of the Old Web era are great, IMO, though there are some aspects that should be left behind like sites only working in specific browsers, or flashing pop-up ads!
So don't do this!
Record Compendium hosts the supplementary material and lore. It was created because Tapas doesn't give the option to create extra pages, so an external site was needed. Record Compendium launched in 2017 on Wordpress, but began to find its footing in October 2018. It became a repository for Magical Renegades lore, but because it's curated and I'm trying to keep it neatly organized, not every art or writing idea that was tangentially related would be a good fit for it.
Ideas gathered like a growing collection of knick-knacks on a dusty shelf. Their only chance of being brought out for display was "when the time was right", but when would that be? After the next announcement of an episode? After they could be fit in with a story? I could never feel sure. Ideas on my to-do list, either one I wrote down or the one I try to keep in my mind, kept building up.
The perfect opportunity struck in 2021: I was introduced to Neocities!
How could these grounds for personal sites that encourage the fun parts of the Old Web elude me? I don't know how they eventually did but I remembered lurking on the old web a lot in my childhood. They were fun and each had their unique charm, but over years I witnessed the rise of the walled gardens of large social media. Websites looking more samey. They had a cleaner and more polished look, but looked more similar to each other.
There was less room to experiment with designs. Personal sites, and a few old-school webcomic hosting sites remain, but they were being seen more as relics of an old era. That was usually said in a negative way, like they were an outdated format that no one would want to keep using. If that were true, there'd be no interest in old tech, nor would vinyl records have a resurgence!
Before I laid out the groundwork for 90's Resort, I lurked around for inspiration, and was inspired! So much creativity and people having fun designing their webpages! These sites looked like the sites I remember with a few modern twists that the current state of the web, such as the commentary against modern social media's ubiquity.
Sites in the style of the Old Web were still around with a thriving community that kept up with the times by reminding people there are alternatives to the corporate-dominated mainstream social media, and that designing sites from scratch can be fun!
As a visual person, I sketched page layouts before I began coding them. Rough sketches of how tables would be arranged, and the text and images within them. After the layouts were sketched, I scrawled HTML tags and values to the side.
The most complex page of 90's Resort is the index, which I made a mock-up of the layout and content for in Inkscape before I began coding. Resizing, moving, or changing the color of anything was easy, and this was just what I needed. After I mapped out the color schemes of the styles that would be used, I was ready for the next step!
While I was coding, or sketching, I'd jot down ideas for more material, and for pieces of art to decorate the site. Those ideas could come up at any step of development so it was always valuable to keep a note-taking program within reach! Development usually hasn't been a linear process!
The development began in May 2021, and launched on November 15. See The News Stand for a behind the scenes look at the development process. The posts before November 15th are from before the launch, and give glimpses into the process, of development hell, and breaking free from it!
Coding also had its tribulations. See the next section for more about that!
No JavaScript. 100% hand-coded!
This site would qualify for the 100% Hand Coded HTML club!
I didn't intentionally strive for this, but when none of the WYSIWYG editors I tried that should've been compatible worked, and all I had was a text editor, I made do with what would!
It was an ordeal, carefully looking through the code to spot errors and fix them each time! @_@ I type it all out in TextEdit and then paste it into Neocities' editor to help check for errors.
The lack of JavaScript is because I never learned it, but not using keeps the sizes of the pages down. If I were to use JavaScript on any pages, I'd want it to have a purpose.
I'm moving away from using center tags for images, but when I started this site, I used them to center all the content because a pair of tags are easier to type and remember than the workarounds in CSS. Officially, center tags are depreciated but they still work. I still think using them shouldn't be looked down on but I also see the rationale for the workarounds in CSS. Whichever is more efficient for the person making a site.
While I kept coding from scratch before the launch, I wanted to make the best of this challenge. The minimalism of coding in a text editor is quite nice, even without the helpful features. This was daunting, but it felt worth it!
I've used Bryce, Blender, Infini-D 3.0, and Ray Dream Studio 4.
When I began making this site, I was using Infini-D 3.0 the most for 3D renders. Since I intended to make 3D renders that looked like they were from the 90's, I used a program from the 90's that was pretty easy for me to re-learn without the manual. There's also nostalgia.
Blender is the only one of those programs that is modern. I tend to like modern software that is FLOSS, but I disliked using this when I tried 2.7. 2.8 overhauled the UI, and it has been a much better experience since! I use it extensively to model props and backgrounds, and I could still use it here for retro renders, if I can replicate the feel and quality renders from the 90's.
At the time I started this site, the latest Blender version I was using was 2.9. Also since then I became a lot more proficient with using Blender, and it's gained so many more helpful features that it's my go-to.
I only tried out Ray Dream Studio once or twice, and had no tutorials to help me get started, but most of the controls were easy enough for me to figure out without using one! Haven't used Bryce in ages, but I want to again. Bryce and Infini-D were the first two 3D programs I used.
Krita for my modern program, and Claris Brushstrokes for an older program in color, and MacPaint for an older program in black and white! The computers in the Keep older computers useful buttons were made with Brushstrokes.
If there's just one piece of advice I could give for someone who wants to make a comic, webtoon, novel or anything else it'd be "Have fun but also make sure the writing and drawing process is sustainable for yourself."
I learned this the hard way multiple times 🙃 Magical Renegades' history is rife with this! The webtoon which ran from 2020-2024 adapted a webcomic that got discontinued in 2019. I started it over as a webtoon because I liked the format though there was a trade-off.
Pacing problems can be the downfall of a project. Near the end of the comic version I got bored because of pacing problems. All of the pages I needed to make to get to the next major plot point felt like a chore.
I didn't have that issue with the webtoon version so much, but it got discontinued due to an unforeseen circumstance; continuing it in that format eventually became unsustainable for me. Each episode had a lot of steps in the production process and the update schedule was once a month at the most.
This was a slower schedule than I hoped it'd be, but I still had my eye on the goal for years and knew that I'd keep going, getting to where I hoped to one day if I patiently kept up the process. The WIP Archive and Production Notes pages through 2024 are demonstrations of this philosophy.
Magical Renegades has always been a solo project so its format is based on what I can do and sustain alone. However, the process for making webtoons that was working eventually became too much for me to continue, but a monthly update schedule also wasn't cutting it for me anymore.
What can I say now? When resources are limited with a solo project (time to draw it, money, etc.), I'm prioritizing efficiency but still want to make it fun to keep working on. Prioritizing efficiency is prioritizing which way may be easier but more enjoyable for a creator to convey their ideas and plays to their strengths. This'd be finding what works best for you. It can be through novels, novels with illustrations, comics, webtoons, a worldbuilding wiki, a game series or something else!
This is like why I wanted to make comics in the first place. I wanted to draw and tell a story, but drawing felt like more of my strength than narrating for a novel. Times changed, and I changed that it's now more efficient for me to write novels with illustrations to supplement the writing, but this core philosophy hasn't changed.
Before I continued MR as a webnovel, I already had experience trying the illustrated webnovel format that worked well at a steady pace. It's bittersweet that I can't illustrate as much as I used to, but what I used to dread about narrating for novels became an opportunity; plenty of background details can convey the atmosphere I intend even if I don't get to illustrating them.
