/ Problem
A merciless world that plays fair
FrostBound is set in a frozen frontier clinic at the edge of a dead, post-apocalyptic, nuclear winter. A world that's quiet enough that the smallest wrong sound can feel like a threat. The design goal is a specific emotional arc: the player should feel duty, authority, and hard-won competence, while never forgetting that the world around them is cruel and waiting to punish them.
The trap in that goal is unfairness. A game that simply takes things from you feels like the game cheating, and players quit feeling cheated rather than haunted. So the real design challenge was this: make every loss read as the player's own mismanagement - or a genuinely impossible situation - while keeping the fiction pitiless. The cruelty has to live in the world and the stakes, not in the rules. The systems underneath are inconspicuously fair, while the atmosphere on top of them is not.
/ Approach
Three systems, one machine
The core loop is intake → investigate → decide, run under three resource pressures that deliberately share one source.
01 — Convergent Deduction
The Diagnosis Tracker
A mysterious disease turns people into monsters, but it presents as six strains across a pool of twenty symptoms, where different combinations identify each of the strains. The player marks symptoms as they surface and the tracker grays out the strains that no longer match until a single strain remains. This idea is directly inspired by Phasmophobia's evidence notebook. The player is the detective; the tool only confirms the deduction, it never makes it. The ambiguity is the point, but it's ambiguity that eventually resolves.
A once-daily Doctor's Radio call layers on top: narratively it's a worsening epidemic reported from afar, mechanically it's a paced hint system. Admitted patients get sicker over time, measured by severity levels. At level 3 a patient is incurable and the only way to protect the others, and themself is to put them down.
02 — One Resource, Three Jobs
The Heat Economy
Heat works triple duty. It powers the Examinator3000's scans, and different types of scans cost different amounts of heat. A full-body scan costs more than reading just a head or a limb, so investigation is a strategy in and of itself. Let heat hit zero overnight and the player freezes to death. Running scans therefore needs to be carefully calculated, with risk and reward deliberately weight against each other. A full-body scan may be affordable, but if the clinic is packed you risk it being too cold overnight.
Dialogue offers a bit of relief in this avenue: ask a patient about their symptoms and you spend no heat. But patients aren't doctors, so you're trading certainty for guesses and assumptions.
03 — Weighted, Hidden Reputation
The Moral Ledger
A hidden reputation score tracks who you killed and how. Putting down a healthy or barely-sick patient costs far more than a terminal patient, and dialogue choices such as who you turn away, and which characters they were can move it too. The meter drives the village mutiny that ends a run. It's hidden on purpose, and the player won't know it's a thing until they fail and receive that ending.
The counterpart to this is the body-bag ritual. When you kill, you physically have to pick up the bag, carry it to the furnace, and burn it. The invisible number has a visceral, manual cost that the player has to perform.
The Hinge
The Delivery Man
These aren't three separate puzzles; one NPC intertwines them. The Delivery Man brings wood for the furnace on a schedule and delivers cures on order. Ordering more cures causes his arrivals to be delayed. So a heavy medicine order shortens your time-to-treat a sick patient but simultaneously starves your next wood delivery, which is your heat, which is both your scan budget and your survival. Every order is a single bet placed across diagnosis, heat, and survival at once. He's the reason the three systems read as one machine instead of three separate features.
/ Implementation
In-game captures
Fig. 1: Diagnosis tracker
Fig. 2: Examinator3000
Fig. 3: Doctor's Radio
Fig. 4: The body-bag ritual
Fig. 5: Delivery Man order screen
(Media slots to fill.)
/ Outcome
What the interlock produces
Because the systems share inputs, no decision is ever local. If you spend heat to scan, you've moved your survival clock; order a cure and you've moved your heat and your treatment window. The payoff is that when a patient turns and you're forced to kill them, it reads as something you let happen, not something the game did to you. That's the fairness-under-cruelty thesis realized in mechanics rather than asserted in tone.
Iteration
The clearest design correction came from feedback from an early playtest. FrostBound originally started with a cold open. The Doctor had already left to assist with the outbreak in the nearest city, abandoning the player to figure the clinic out alone. The intent was to hit the "harsh and unforgiving" note immediately. It didn't land: the problem wasn't difficulty, it was legibility. Learning to play had become a mystery on top of the intended ones. Four to five weeks out from a major deadline, we pivoted to a tutorial day with the Doctor present, walking the player through a single full loop. It solved the onboarding and, with later story work, became a tonal and narrative pillar of the game. The lesson is the useful one for a designer to have learned: an unforgiving game still has to be teachable. Harshness and opacity are not the same thing.
Authorship
The shape of the game was decided as a team; the executive calls on the systems were mine — the convergence logic behind the symptom tracker, the routing of NPCs through a universal symptom-line system in C# and YarnSpinner, and the final tuning of the resource economy.
Roadmap
The branching, multi-ending narrative is designed but not yet built; the current build follows a single path.
Fair under fire
Systems legible enough that losses read as the player's, never the game's.
One shared resource
Heat couples investigation and survival into a single tension.
Systems as one machine
The Delivery Man entangles diagnosis, heat, and reputation.
Designed, then corrected
The cold-open → tutorial pivot, driven by playtest evidence.