Winter Survival News

In the real world, long before you die from starvation, you are likely to loose your mind and die by a consequence of it. Winter Survival is trying to add your mind to the already extensive repertoire of survival mechanics with the game’s sanity.
 
Whenever your body suffers, so can your mind and in turn you are beginning to loose your sanity bit by bit. You have to keep yourself warm, fed and hydrated. When you eat food you don’t know, you can get poisoned. If you don’t watch your step, you might fall and sprain your ankle. You’re just a regular person - wild animals and darkness scare you. Push yourself too hard, don’t sleep enough, and bad things will happen…
 


If you fail to take care of yourself, your mind will turn against you, make things more difficult, play tricks on your and even lead to hallucinations. Next time you wake up, things might not be the same. It might be just headaches. Panic attacks. Or you might see your organs rotting from the inside. Watch as the world distorts and collapses around you. Soon, you might not even know what’s real anymore. As you smile at the guy next to you, you forget you saw him before, frozen in the snow.
 
Sometimes, you can find comfort in your past. A picture of a lost love. A song shared with a friend. Other times, rely on simple things. A warm meal or a cigarette might be enough to get some relief. At least for a short while. But once you let your mind fall, you can never get your sanity back.       
 


You never know how much more you can endure before insanity hits. It might be the next time you go to bed. And when your mind weakens, it’s easier to just stay asleep. So as you fight to survive, waking up takes longer and longer. Eventually, you might never open your eyes again…
 
Normally, as you learn and adapt, surviving gets easier. But in Winter Survival, you can never let your guard down. The loss of sanity is an ever-present risk, lurking in the shadows. It feeds on your mistakes and makes it harder to live another day. Be careful not to lose yourself in your journey back home. 



If we got you interested in the game’s sanity system, make sure to follow us. We will look into the details of the sanity mechanics in a future DevLog.

Join our stream during Steam’a Survival Fest and have another look at Winter Survival. With the game going into Early Access in just about 2 months and an updated demo being worked on, there is a lot that will be going on in and around Winter Survival very soon!

Initially planned for late Q2 2022, we are now finally settling on 27.10.2022 for our Early Access release date. Oddly enough, we were actually ready for release this month, but so many games postponed their launch into June, that with the Steam festival and the Summer Sale that follows, we decided to not try to squeeze in there as well.
We simply wouldn’t get the exposure we wanted to the game. With the release of our Food Truck Simulator on 14.09.2022 and new content for our Gas Station Simulator also planed in September, a Winter Survival release in October makes the most sense. It’s also closer to the actual winter :P



The upside of a release in October is more time to expand the version that goes into Early Access. The plan was always to deliver a complete gaming experience, but now we can expand the game world a bit and also work on the first major update to add additional game mechanics and a whole new chunk of the game world shorty after entering Early Access.
This in turn gives up more time to handle the initial feedback and make changes whenever necessary.

The graphics below gives you an idea about the initial size of the game world on launch day compared to what you might already know from the demo and which areas will be added during Early Access:



In the meantime, we continue to tweak the visuals, balancing and further expand on the sanity system which we consider one of the most important aspects of the game.



You know the drill in survival games, half the game loop is about eating and drinking and getting enough resources to fulfil those needs. Working with an experienced explorer like Marek Kaminski, a guy who claimed both the North and South Pole within a year unaided, gave us some much needed insights into how to better shape our game.

The reality of it is, that survival games get some aspects really wrong these days. Yes, keeping hydrated is extremely important, but it’s more likely that your mind goes way before you die of starvation. That’s an aspect of gameplay we tried to pursue in addition to the usual mechanics you would expect and have a stronger focus on the mental state with our sanity system.



There will be a series of DevLogs leading up to the release focusing on certain aspects of the game and its game mechanics. So stay tuned.

With the last Steam festival barely over, Winter Survival is now participating in Simfest. That is great news for us as it gives the game more exposure for the upcoming Early Access and motivates the team behind the game to push the development even harder.

We are right now in a crucial phase of the game’s development by wrapping up everything we want to deliver for the Early Access launch and it’s quite a lot. The game’s demo set a certain goal for us and we obviously want to surpass it for the game itself as well as a new demo to accompany the launch :)

With the last Steam festival barely over, Winter Survival is now participating in Simfest. That is great news for us as it gives the game more exposure for the upcoming Early Access and motivates the team behind the game to push the development even harder.

We are right now in a crucial phase of the game’s development by wrapping up everything we want to deliver for the Early Access launch and it’s quite a lot. The game’s demo set a certain goal for us and we obviously want to surpass it for the game itself as well as a new demo to accompany the launch :)