DevBlog Update for May, 2026

We’ve wanted to give regular updates for a long time. We (and by we, I mean me, Gideon) dropped the ball—sorry! Many of you know a lot about our progress because we’ve told you personally (especially during sprints instead of writing). Now we’ll tell you here. And believe me, there’s so much to tell you.

Allow us to introduce ourselves (with pen names, of course)

I (Gideon Adams) am FableWorks' CEO. I manage business operations. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you put on a cowboy hat and look at your watch. (If you know, you know.) FableWorks came to me as a concept a few years ago, and it’s my job, with the help of our team, to make it a reality.

Liza is FableWorks' CCO. She handles our vision for marketing and the general look and feel of the site. All the artwork you’ll see when you use Fableworks was created by her, by hand.

The Architect is FableWorks' CTO. He directs all of our tech-related decisions, and frankly there’s nothing he can’t do on the development side. The Architect is building our entire infrastructure—the database, the website, and the software that will eventually power Fableworks. Giving him a real challenge has eluded me. (For now.) The Architect is a really cool guy.

Agustine is FableWorks' social media director. She creates the content you see on Instagram and TikTok. She also hosts events and does a great job building a sense of community around FableWorks. There’s a lot in store from her!

Eli Road is FableWorks' accountant. She'll keep our finances in order, especially when tax season rolls around. I'm glad someone smarter than me is handling that.

Now that you know who we are, let’s get into what we’ve been up to. First, the company is real! It’s actually been real for a while. We registered FableWorks as an LLC in May, 2025. We also purchased our domain—fableworks.art—which is where you’ll post novels, short stories, comics, and manga, as well as build up your viewership.

Visuals

This will really excite you. One of our projects has been to design the front-end for both FableWorks Desktop and FableWorks Mobile. Many of you already know how talented Liza is. She and I put our heads together to build a user interface we think you’ll enjoy.

This is a prototype design of the Home Page for FableWorks Desktop. Our philosophy with the UI is this: Keep it simple. The idea is to have intuitive menus that are easy to navigate. You shouldn’t have to figure it out. Just hop on and enjoy!

I bet a lot of you like reading in bed (I sure do), so Liza chose a color palette that won’t strain your eyes in dim lighting. As you can see, she gave FableWorks a lo-fi dreamy feel with low-saturated, cool colors. Presently, we don’t have a light or dark mode, but we probably will in the future. By the way, what kind of monster uses light mode?

Anyway, let’s tackle the interface. I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining what the search and account buttons are, but further down you’ll notice a ribbon menu with Genres, Authors, and a few other options. We thought about putting distinct genres there like Fantasy or Romance, but the genre list is too long (it would make the menu cramped and hideous), and more genres may be added over time. Instead, we’ll provide a separate genre page. Same goes for the other options. The Authors button will let you browse artists and writers on another page. The other buttons—same deal.

Below that, we've got the Home Page Highlights. The first thing I’d like to point out is the tile/carousel system. Each tile will show the cover art for a work. When you click a tile, it will expand broadly to the right and be divided into four sections: the cover art, the title, the author and genre tags, and, if it’s a literary work or comic, the back-cover blurb. Additionally, the tiles are arranged in a carousel menu. You’ve probably used those before. They let you scroll left or right to browse, which gives a nice “bookshelf feel.”

The Home Page Highlights have four sections: Popular Now, Latest Additions, Explore More, and Community News (not shown in the screenshot). Here’s how each one works:

Popular Now: This section shows the most popular works on the site—what’s getting the most traffic. You get the idea.

Latest Additions: You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t know what "Latest Additions" means.

Explore More: This section is a random shuffle of everything on FableWorks. We don’t want your works’ only shot at Home Page visibility to be when you first post them or if they become popular. This section guarantees you’ll always have a chance. There will be some algorithmic control here to prevent anyone from showing up too often at the expense of others. So for a time, any work that has recently been displayed will have a reduced (albeit non-zero) chance of reappearing in this section.

Community News: Here's where you’ll discover the goings-on at FableWorks. This will include events, the devblog (you’re here!), updates about in-house IPs, and a few other odds and ends depending on how medicated I am. (Current status: not)

The mobile version of the site works much the same as desktop. It’s just optimized for your enormous thumbs instead of a cursor. Have a look!

Here, you’ll quickly identify the sections you’re familiar with. We didn't include the Explore More section in this screenshot so you could see Community News (normally you'd scroll down), but it'll be in the final version. At the top-left, the FableWorks logo opens the ribbon menu options you saw on the desktop version. It’s not a ribbon menu on mobile, of course. It’s a nice-looking list. It still has all the same functions, though. On the top-middle is the search feature. The moon at the top-right brings up account information, and it’ll be replaced with your profile picture once you’ve signed in.

We still have a ways to go on the front-end design. When it’s all said and done, there will be a Creator’s dashboard where you’ll manage your works, monetization, statistics, etc. There will be viewing pages, which is what actually displays your work to viewers. Those will be tailored specifically for books, comics, manga, etc. You can also expect individual genre pages with custom artwork. By the way, you should see what Liza is doing with the Fantasy genre art. There were audible gasps when she showed us at the last sync meeting.

Technology

The Architect has been working pretty hard on the back-end. What a nerd. Anyway, FableWorks will operate as three components that work together: The front-end site, the database, and the service software (think of this as FableWorks’ brain). The front-end site’s design is still in development (as you saw earlier). The framework for the database is mostly done. I’m working with the Architect on a list of features (it’s long) so he can make sure the software and database support everything we need. He’s made a ton of progress with the service software. It’s aliiive!! In fact, he recently completed the notifications system, which will send automatic emails and other notifications to users. We got an SMTP server to test it. Guys, it’s so cool. I can’t wait for you to use it.

Here’s a note from the legend himself about what he’s been doing:

“Hey everyone, here’s the high-level breakdown of the progress that’s been made on the technology side of the FableWorks website.

First off, I made the decision early on to create a REST API to interact with the database. This will allow for greater versatility in that we can have more applications access the database in the future such as a mobile app without giving them access to our database server directly (improved security). It also provides a significant improvement in speed as we can cache (temporarily store) commonly requested pages and bits of data. This creates a lot of room for future expansion. This API is now fully functional.

Another core element of the FableWorks website is an application to run scheduled, routine tasks on the server (ex. sending emails from a queue, sending reminders, data cleanup, etc.). I call this app the FableWorks Service. Like the website itself, this app uses the aforementioned API to retrieve data from the database in a secure way, and caches it so as to not create too much work for the API. This data will be periodically refreshed so that the service can be controlled from the admin pages of the website. As a bonus, it can also be duplicated on different servers to divide the amount of work for when demand becomes greater.

One more thing: as this website will handle money, it’s important to keep track of any and all changes or errors for auditing and debugging purposes. For this reason, the database now supports detailed auditing which tracks changes and errors in the code.”

-The Architect

I’m going to quiz all of you on that later. Be ready. 

Well, that’s a wrap! I hope to have another of these cooked up for you soon. I didn’t want this update to be too long, and Lord knows there’s more to talk about. I’d really like to explain our plans for DMCA (copyright) and the measures we’re putting in place to keep your work safe. Next time, I’ll do that. I’ll probably also talk about how your works will be presented, the layouts, bookmarking features, comments, our stance on AI (which most of you will like), etc.

We are fellow creators like you. With that in mind, we aim to build something you'll love.

This is Gideon Adams signing off. See you on Discord!