A 56-page interactive choose-your-own style comic - Avoiding Work is a silly and lighthearted story with a mystery at its core. Originally created for and sold at the Short Box Digital Comic Fair in 2023.
Avoiding Work at the Sunny Day Cafe and Bakery - Blurb
Cat's ultimate goal for any work day is to do as little as possible, but the over-enthusiastic new hire who's been put in her charge isn't making it easy. Help Cat slack off, poke around in her co-workers business, and maybe even find out who's responsible for the Morning Smell in this interactive digital comic.
Avoiding Work at the Sunny Day Cafe and Bakery is a choose-your-own style comic with multiple routes through the story and four different endings. The comic is an interactive PDF, so readers can jump through the story easily using hyperlinks at the bottom of pages.
Avoiding Work at the Sunny Day Cafe and Bakery is available digitally on my itch.io page!
You can read my interview with the Cartoonist Coop about Avoiding Work here.
Writing Process
As I was making a comic intended for PDF, I wanted to take advantage of what that medium could offer over physical print. I'm a big fan of interactive fiction, and I discovered PDFs are actually capable of a lot of interactivity. I learnt how to link pages together while linking up table of contents pages during another job - this seemed to me like a great shortcut to making a branching path comic without having the reader laboriously scroll to the correct page each time. These hyperlinks worked successfully in every format which I tried opening the PDF in (browser, PDF reader, even within messaging apps).
I planned the story tree in Twine (above) which was a really nice way to visualise and organise everything. At the end of the comic I include a 'story map', which acts as a guide to people who want to reread the comic and see different pathways.
Concept Art
