video to come

A hybrid digital / pen and paper experience about reading physical documents and drawing a map as you play .

You are with the 1911 British Antarctic Expedition. Captain Scott has not returned from his attept of the pole, and has surely perished. You have trekked to the last depot and found his remaining notes. You need to follow these notes to find the location of his body and ascertain whether Scott made it to the pole before Amundsen. A blizzard has hit, making navigation difficult.

Made in 48 Hours for Duck Sauce Jam 2025, winning ‘Best Storytelling’.

download from itch

source code

Tools

Written in Common Lisp, and on paper.

Made using my disseration project graphics framework.

Implementation

The game is intentionally very fuzzy and difficult to visually parse. the idea is to make it easy for the player to get lost, and to simulte the feeling of being stuck in a blizzard desperately trying to navigate without clear visual signposts.

I clearly tooks creative liberties with the compass. The game takes place close to the south pole, so a compass does not work as expected. I don’t account for this, instead opting to make it more helpful for people drawing maps.

The map has a grid structure, and the player can only rotate 90 degrees or walk one tile forward. This reduced player motion makes it much easier to produce a map of the game while playing.

There are six different tile types, each being a 3D model made in blender. Some are traversible, others block the path or make the sledgemeter (like a stamina bar) go down quicker. As each piece is the same size, I can render the surrounding tiles aligned to a grid.

Feedback

The game was played live in front of me by a few different people, and I also got online feedback. Two players managed to discover the bodies (the objective of the game), and interestingly produced very different looking maps. Others did not map their surroundings properly and were convinced they were stuck in a dead end.

It was very interesting to compare different people’s approaches to mapping. Some were very abstract and quick to make, while others took time to accurately reproduce their surroundings.

The main issue with the game was the lack of usefulness of the lob book i included. I intentionally wrote with an old fashion hand and was vague about the route to the bodies. This meant that noone actually used it as intended.