The Botanist
Story, Art & Programming
The Botanist is an interactive sci-fi adventure comic for the Playdate handheld game system. I wrote and illustrated the comic, and programmed it using Playdate Lua SDK.
Users use the Playdate's crank to scroll through the comic where they follow the Botanist as he travels through space, searching planets for the rare plants needed to solve the food shortage back home.
The Botanist was selected as one of the launch titles for the official Playdate store, Catalog.
Sequels
I've created two other Playdate comics set in the same universe as The Botanist.
Both are available on Itch.io: Illumination and To Dust.
Panels Framework
I created a flexible open source framework called Panels for building these kinds of interactive comics.
Developers just need to provide Panels with a Lua table that describes the sequences in their comic (scroll direction, panel sizes, text, animation and effects) along with layered graphics. Panels will handle layout, scrolling, animation, and even chapter navigation.
Comics built with Panels support layered parallax scrolling, animated transitions, synchronized audio, and more.