Season Survival

[blargen]

Perhaps a new challenge idea, or sandbox, later on the development trail.

You start the game, stranded, as you do now and your goal is to survive the entire winter in the map you choose (no crossing into other maps) and when you do it unlocks this challenge in another map. You have a calendar to see how far you've gone, and you just have to survive until April till the roads clear.

Why this is different than sandbox? We have a goal, and below are some reasons I think this will be a challenge.

Start in early November, and basically its Voyageur mode in the sense that wolves are scared of you bears only if provoked, game is easy and numerous, non perishables are all over the place as is supplies and wood. The weather is warm in the day, dips below freezing at night. Storms are not as frequent. Walking accross lakes and creeks are very dangerous (ice breaking).

As the months go on, daytime is shortened making night longer, temperature dips colder and colder with each day, storms more common. Supplies are not refreshed, neither is game, so you'll need to conserve items (this would require tweaking the decay time on canned foods to let them last the winter), wolves become a little more aggressive in the sense they will protect their kills more and attack you if you are bleeding or wounded. Wood doesn't respawn, so gathering wood would become harder as you need to venture deeper to find it.

By the time February hits weather is full on freezing and storms are constant. Supplies are very low if you didn't stockpile, and game is very scarce. Hope you saved some ammo and canned food, you're going to spend alot of time inside.

As winter comes to an end, the temperature begins to warm up, winter cold changes to rain (making going outside tricky if you get caught in a storm = hypothermia), game is all but a distant memory and wolves are in full stalker mode. They will hunt you down if they even see you. Once again, walking across the ice is a dangerous gamble.

Once spring hits, and the roads become clear, rescue comes and find you.

Just an idea, I know it would take a considerable amount of tweaking and design, but sandbox is fun but I think a goal and an increased difficulty the longer you survive could be interesting.

Thanks for reading.

[Bill Tarling]

Different seasons are planned for sequels depending on the response to this first volume.

[Amazombie]

I would think they would need to have an smoking option for meat as well as increase the yield.