How would you go about making a simple book using Hype?

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Hi Forum,

I’m brand new to this. I’ve read the documentation, a bit of it stuck, I guess. But I’m not sure how to progress from here.

I’m interested in Hype for its ability to create a (non-animated) book for a website, with page turns. I want it to look like a book in a skeuomorphic kind of way, so the table of contents is an actual page inside the book rather than a separate navigation section, if that makes sense.

Thank you very much to the person who provided the head code to allow page turns using arrow keys. This was helpful. It worked beautifully. I’ve also set up page turns with swipes.

Apart from the page turns I only need this ebook to do a few other things:

  1. Jump to each chapter from the Table of Contents scene on mouse click.
  2. Include a home button on each page which takes user back to Table of Contents on mouse click. Does this require making use of symbols? I don’t even know.
  3. Add narration SFX after user ‘turns the page’ and taps any key on the keyboard (except for the back and forward arrows, that is.)
  4. Ideally I’d like a soundtrack to play as user navigates through the front cover, copyright page, and table of contents, without it stopping and starting again should they jump back and forth through these ‘peritextual’ parts of the book. I gather from another thread that this requires making use of a symbol but I can’t quite get my head around it yet.

What I’ve set up so far is probably the labour intensive and stupid way of going about it. I created a scene with the page turns then duplicated it until I had as many scenes as I have pages in the book. There are quite a few pages. It took a while.

At the time, I also attached a page turn SFX to this ‘template’ but now I’m finding it annoying and want to delete that. If I go to the resources library and try to delete, of course I can’t because it’s being used. Is there a way to delete this SFX from every scene in one fell swoop without manually going through every page and deleting it twice per page?

What would be the sensible way of going about a project like this, acknowledging that the program probably isn’t set up for using scenes as pages in a 226 page book…

Side note. I set up the Table of Contents by creating a no fill rectangle over the chapter headings (I’ve imported the pages as images which fill each page). I had it all working. Then I attached an action Jump to scene to these rectangles but they have disappeared this morning after closing the program overnight. Any ideas how I might have deleted all that set-up by accident??

Any tips and tricks for a beginner making an ebook would be appreciated. It’s a lot, I know, but I suspect there are some very basic concepts I don’t have my head around yet.

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Yeah, you won't like that. Ha Ha.

That book template is the short version. When I used it for a full book, scene management was rough. You don't want to change your mind after creating a scene, or it could be lots of tedious clicking.

Where the template might help you out is how it links to other scenes/pages in the book. You could totally build a table of contents with that... if you do it manually... which is tedious.

That's how I do it. I use a persistent symbol to make a user interface.

That's just an event. Sounds can be played on scene load or button press. But to prevent browser issues, make a "play" button first. Like here...

...no sounds are played until the player presses a button. That unlocks audio playing in the web browser — assuming it doesn't get even more restrictive in the future :stuck_out_tongue:

It's shakespearean... a play within a play... where a symbol is basically a Hype project within a Hype project. Getting events inside the symbol to fire is tricky. I use JavaScript to get that part working.

I suppose what you're trying to do is possible. If I'm remembering correctly, there was a really awesome Hype project (don't remember where) that had an animated story. It's possible, it's tedious, but I don't know of anything else that's close to this. If I ever animated Revisions, and I wanted to make it an interactive App, I'd probably still use Hype.

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Thanks for your reply. Symbols sound like mise en abyme. Sadly, I still have no idea where to start with that. Looks like I need to know JavaScript before I can do what I want to do.