Blackout: Antarctica

"In Antarctica, when the power goes out, you don't talk of "blackouts", 'cause nothing's black there.
There's the sun light, a lot of it, but it's just not for you. Everything broken is still perfectly visible:
freezed unusable machines in a white hell. It's the whiteout."

- Someone Something, 19Somewhen, I guess.

You wake up in an a research station in the middle of the Antarctic continent. You're alone, but the orders of your commander still get you: you need to leave, the station is already falling apart. The facilities around you need some repair, resources must be rationed, and time is not infinite.  Choosing which and when machines are needed is the key to surviving another day.

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Blackout: Antarctica is a simple management game with building and survival mechanics. You play as the last poor fellow in a broken research station, trying to escape the place. During the day, you choose how to spend your limited actions and resources to repair and upgrade machines. The machines work together and transform your resources into more supplies! When you have enough, you might want to repair the last piece of the puzzle and leave for home on the snowmobile.

Controls

The game is entirely playable with the MOUSE.

NOTE: You can see what resources each building produces by clicking on the slot with the level number, right below the machine name, on the card.

Development Notes

The game has been made in 9 days by Thoozee and cat.astro, for the Godot Wild Jam #60 of August 2023.

The theme was MALFUNCTION, and we opted for a game where the ambient was malfunctioning, and your goal is to resolve the situation. A research station in the middle of ices seemed a nice place to survive through.

We wanted to convey the idea of something falling apart, therefore the machines already built might break again. With few resources available, the player must choose whether to repair them immediately, or keep them broken and invest on something else. Different buildings might serve the same function, so what's the minimum amount to escape the place?

The final score is a way to evaluate how efficient the player strategy was. Days are counted positively if the player dies (more days = longer surviving), but negatively if the player manages to escape (more days = slower escape). Of course, the goal si to survive...

We also included one of the three wildcard, "ONE MOMENT", as one of the possible machines that help the player to escape: what's better than resting on freezing wooden axes, looking at nothing an gaining a bonus action everyday?

Meet the Team

We are cat.astro and Thoozee! We're both developers (more or less) with a passion for nice little projects, especially software projects... Sometimes, when GameDev calls, we improvise as graphics artists and musicians, with dubious results :P

You can follow us on Instagram!

Credits

The game was developed using Godot 4.1, Krita, GIMP,  and Audacity.
Everything you see, hear or experience during the game has been crafted with love (and sweat) by the two of us, within the jam period.

Fonts are the only exception: we used three fonts with Open Font License (OFL):

• Encode Sans and its variant Encode Sans SC from Google Fonts, for bodies.
• Norwester from 1001 Fonts, for titles and the cover.
• Oxanium from Google Fonts, for the cover.