Orbital Cultivation, 2021

Digital role-playing game

Manahil Bandukwala & Liam Burke

Manahil Bandukwala (she/her) is a writer & visual artist. She is currently Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine & Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based writing collective VII. Her collaborative chapbook with Conyer Clayton, Sprawl | the time it took us to forget (Collusion, 2020), was shortlisted for the bpNichol Award. Her first full length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2022.

Liam Burke (he/him/himbo) lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. He is most recently the co-author of machine dreams with natalie hanna (Collusion, 2021) and Orbital Cultivation with Manahil Bandukwala (Collusion, 2021). His work has most recently appeared in Roi Fainéant, INKSOUNDS, The Daily Drunk, Savant-Garde, The Jupiter Review, and long con magazine and is forthcoming in Sledgehammer Lit, Olney Magazine, and Rejection Letters.

“Orbital Cultivation (the game) grew out of our desire to make an interactive piece of art to accompany Orbital Cultivation (the chapbook). The poems are set in a spaceship, and we liked the idea of being able to walk through the ship to find the poems that make up the sequence. Many of the poems reference areas of the narrators’ ship (greenhouse, living quarters, bridge), so we storyboarded that ship and built it in RPG Maker MV. Transforming the story from poem to game allowed us to flesh out the lore of the story. It also gave us the chance to give more insight into the relationship between the two characters, and to make it fun (and funny)! We spent a lot of time riffing off each other to design the mini-puzzles and flavour text, and learned a lot of coding logic to make elements of the game work.”

Orbital Cultivation follows two lovers through a broken down spaceship. Fix up the ship and prepare for landing on a new planet. Explore rooms, talk to skeletons and teddy bears, and get to know the two lovers along the way.

Scattered around the spaceship are poems that weave together a narrative of loss, love, and renewal.

Complete puzzles in each room to advance through the ship. Chests will contain the items you need to move to the next room.

Use arrow keys to move around. Click SPACE to interact with objects.