All the pieces are finished, now is the time to put them together. I have to create a finished product that I can publish.
I had to spend some time to digitalize my crude drawings into an usable (and frankly readable) format. That meant spending some time retracing every stroke again. I loaded the original scanned image into Krita and then painting over it.
As you can see, I used the old-school route of drawing my dungeon in a sketchbook with a pencil. The digitized map then also got some additional room numbers, so I can reference them in the text.
The fine art of desktop publishing
When it comes to "professional" layout of a document, be it a book, magazine or in this case a little booklet (zine) there's almost no way around Desktop Publishing (DTP). In contrast to normal writing software, you are kind of free to place elements like text and pictures anywhere you want. There are some things under the hood, which I won't use, like creating output ready for printing (with bleed marks etc.)
There are several applications out there, that provide DTP, several commercial ones (ranging from expensive to cheap) and free. I chose Scribus, the free software. I don't need any fancy features and it should be enough to do this.
As mentioned, I steered away from doing this as a one-page dungeon. There's probably way too much information. I could "cheat" by decreasing font-size, but I wanted to keep it at 12pt, so that could be easily read. Useability goes before novelty. So a booklet it was in the end.
Scribus worked fine for what I needed it to do. I probably didn't use it properly. There are several things that I "brute-forced". Maybe there's a way to do it better, but it worked for me. One thing that was kind of bad, was tables. I have some tables, mostly to roll some random encounters. You can add tables in Scribus, but styling them to my liking just wasn't possible. So in the end, I just used normal text and then added "borders" by creating line elements and putting them in.
Knowing when to finish
You can spend a lot of time in this step, I guess. I managed to put everything down and it looks kind of okay-ish (nowhere near what I've seen other people do in their submissions). It isn't quite what I imagined in my head, but it should do.
So I keep it as-is. With all its imperfection and all. It could probably use some more art, some pages look a bit squatted. There are some weird "single" boxes (Ser Gaillards and Ashmores statblocks are just by themselves for example).
Maybe if I spent some more time I can bring it down to 12 pages (to get another multiple of 4), by shrinking the font-size or so. This should remove some of the blank spaces (and pages). But I don't want to experiment too much with that. I can look into it post-jam or so.
Plans
I plan to submit quite soon. I have to finish the itch.io page and then I'm good to go. Plan is to have it finished end of september, so I have october free for other projects. Once the results are out and I might get some feedback I do some post-jam analysis.