The studio, tidied and made honest
Start a series in the room you will keep working in, see what is really happening while pages draw, and get straight answers from Inky about what it did and what it cost.
What shipped. Twelve changes across Creator Studio, most of them about the same thing: the studio telling you the truth about its own state.
- Start a series where you edit one. New series opens the studio workspace with nothing in it yet, instead of a separate form you then had to unlearn. The fields, the layout and the rail are the ones you keep using. Placeholders show what each field wants, the cover shows the monogram a series without artwork gets, and nothing is written down until you press Create. Prefer to talk it through? Work with Inky is right there in the rail, so you can describe the story and let him set it up without leaving the room.
- Reference sheets you can actually see. Characters, places and props moved above the metadata form, and every card now shows its real artwork. A sheet with a drawing and thin notes reads as drawn — image and text are separate states, because they are. Cards without artwork show an empty slot and a Visualise action with the price on it.
- "100% complete" stopped overstating. It now reads Series details 100% with "what you have written, not what has been drawn", and a separate line counts the reference artwork. Before, a series with one blank character sheet and no drawings at all could report that nothing was missing.
- The drawing bar looks alive only when something is drawing. A shimmer runs while a worker is actually rendering a page. If the queue is stalled the bar sits still, because a moving bar over nothing is a lie.
- Why a page has two drawings. Sometimes Inkroost redraws a page itself, when a floor plan comes out with the wrong number of things in it. That is why some pages carry an extra drawing and others do not, and it has never cost you credits. The review screen and Inky now say so, from the record of what actually happened, instead of guessing.
- Inky reviews the drawings before it keeps them. Ask it to pick the best pages and it looks at the images, compares them against your beat and your sheets, keeps one per page, and shows you the pages in the conversation as it works. If it could not read a drawing, it says so rather than claiming it looked.
- Inky can take a chapter offline. It used to insist that published chapters were locked forever and push you towards starting a new one. They are not, and it now offers to take the chapter offline or pull it back out of review, then makes the edit you asked for on that same chapter.
- Plain words. Inky no longer prints internal tool names, job identifiers or "poll this API" instructions into the chat. When something fails it says what failed, what is unchanged and what to try.
- Buttons that tell you what they are doing. Keeping eighteen pages of a translated edition now shows a real count and a progress bar instead of one greyed-out button and silence, and publishing an edition leaves a result on screen instead of a toast that vanishes before you can read it. The same pattern is now used across the studio's actions.
- Analytics answer the filter. Changing the series used to move the per-series table and nothing else — every card, the funnel and the churn figures stayed on your whole account. They are now scoped to the series you picked, supporters are labelled as account-wide because they genuinely are, and the metric icons stay inside their cards.
- Smaller things. Start a new series sits above your series list. The rail's ink drop and labels got the spacing they were asked for. Partner platforms carry their own logo.
Why it matters. Almost every item above is the same bug in a different place: the studio knew something and showed you something else. A bar that moved while nothing drew, a percentage that counted words and implied drawings, a button that greyed out and never came back, a filter that changed one table, an assistant that invented a reason rather than admit it did not know. None of those cost you work, but each one cost you trust in what the screen was telling you.
How to use it. Open Creator Studio. Start a new series is at the top of your series list, and it opens the same workspace you edit in.