Snow
The game of stark space
Have you ever thought about the role of space in the matters of life and death? What if you had to face the situation where “being lost” is not just an adventure, but a real risk to someone’s wellbeing?
These are the questions and challenges a lot of people are deliberately seeking nowadays. For better or worse, city dwellers are often unsatisfied with their lives in the comfort of civilization and embark on a variety of adventures where the choose to be insulated from mother nature only with a thin layer of technical gear. This experience is even more dramatic in the inhospitable environments — such as the life-unfriendly backdrop of a freezing winter.
For an artist, these situations can offer incredible depth as they pitch humans against the primal forces of nature — but more importantly, against themselves. Standoff with these great forces triggers the very ancient fight-or-flight logic in our minds, offering rich opportunities to resist or to embrace.
To me, nature has always been a place for escape. Ever since I learned as a child that capable and healthy people may sometimes find life to be so unbearable they choose to kill themselves, I have always asked — why they just don’t go live in the woods? With such an easy way to part with the cruelty of mankind and start your life from a clean slate, what can be a better alternative than nature?
But of course, as urban dwellers frequently find, just driving a few hundred miles into the mountains does not completely free you from the yoke of the society. Whatever the decisions you have made away from civilization, they may haunt you until the end of your life.
So what did I want to say with my game?
It started as an exploration of stress and mental pressure in a blank, stark space. I was interested in a question of what people would do if they find someone of their party dead? How would they react if their partner’s life depended on them, but the only clue to the possible actions would be an unreliable narration? How would someone feel waking up in your bed the next day after a tragic accident that happened to their friends?
These were the questions that I asked. It was important for me to set the scene for this type of a story in an open 3D world with a first-person perspective that would define an immersive experience and provide freedom of movement and actions.
My initial decisions in the formal elements and affordances of the game were dictated by these goals of space exploration and immersion. The narrative is delivered by protagonist’s internal dialogue and the flashbacks triggered by findings. While being only partial and incomplete, these glimpses of story leave the blanks for the gamer to fill in.
Beyond the story delivery vehicle, there are only three interface affordances used in the game — first, the movement of protagonist are controlled by the arrow keys. Second, the character can dig using the snow shovel. A reminder for mapping the shovel to character “P” is shown onscreen every time a character comes across a clue.
Finally, an avalanche beeper is provided as audio and HUD indication of an approximate distance to an avalanche burial. It takes some time to get used to as it HUD gives no map or a direction indicator — much like the real snow beacon does.
My high-level concept map of the game logic is shown below.
At the top there is the trigger event (cutscene) that starts the slice. Once the protagonist is placed in the game, his next action is to re-orient himself and start looking for clues. Clues take the form of the personal items and gear of his teammates affected by avalanche:
My initial design assumed additional help to the player in the form of a radio, but testing revealed this was not helpful and diminished the feeling of loneliness.
Another big finding was the importance of flashback narratives: it is rather difficult to make the player sympathize to people he never met; to overcome this issue, an flashback is triggered for every party member to develop their relations with the main character.
This Vimeo footage contains the entire game playthrough:
MacOS build:
Launch instructions:
- Download and unzip
- Right-click to launch (ignore “unsigned publisher” warning)
Controls:
- Arrows to move
- “P” to dig
- Space to ski cutscenes
- “Q” to quit
