CUBURBIA

A screenshot of CUBURBIA's landing page and game menu, featuring a fox cub looking up at a suburban house's roof that spells out CUBURBIA. There are buttons to play the game, view game achievements, and learn about the game. There is also copyright information as follows: © 2024 Vibhu Venkatesh. All Rights Reserved.

Play CUBURBIA for free in your browser here: CUBURBIA Game Link.

CUBURBIA is a hypertext adventure game in which you play as a fox searching for your 8 lost cubs, who have wandered into a suburban neighborhood.

Created as my 2024 college senior project, CUBURBIA explores the resillience of urban wildlife and how we as humans can responsibly interact with them.

SKILLS: Animal Illustration, Children's Illustration, Creative Writing, Ecological Research, Educational Design, Game Development, HTML/CSS, Interactive Design, Storytelling

SOFTWARE: Adobe InDesign, Paint Tool SAI, Twine

YEAR: 2024

Game Stills

A still of the game featuring the main character fox and the 8 fox cubs. The player is able to input names for each of the fox cubs, with some of the default names as follows: Appleseed, Sedge, and Fog. A still of the game showing how many of the fox cubs you've found, as well as some of the locations you can search for them, which include an alleyway, a backyard with a chicken coop, and a vegetable and fruit garden. Across the top, there is a button to quit the game and a graphic of the player's fox running under the moon, looking for the cubs. A still of the game featuring a conflict in which one of the cubs is about to get into a fight with a fox with mange. The player has the option to guide the cub away from the fox or allow the cub to fight. A still of the game featuring the main character fox successfully finding and rescuing one of the cubs before setting out to find the rest of them. Before returning to the den, they hunt some rats in a vegetable garden, while the owner of the garden removes rat poison from the yard.

The game mechanics involve player input, reading and clicking on hyperlinked text, and picking from multiple choice options.

Depending on the choices that the player makes and how many cubs are subsequently rescued, the game's ending will change.

Process Book

The physical copy of the CUBURBIA process book, with a saddle-stitch binding.

A book accompanying the game's in-person exhibition in 2024, which goes through the game's inspiration, process work, and worldbuilding information.

Read the full process e-book here: CUBURBIA Process Book Link.

Game Exhibition

The in-person exhibition of CUBURBIA, displayed inside a handmade fox den alongside my other projects at the 2024 O-Launch Annual Exhibition at Otis College of Art and Design.

Visitors could play the game on a provided laptop, read through the process book, and take a game link card and CUBURBIA character pins (both of which had run out by the time the video was taken).