Press & creator kit · Early Access
A deterministic god-sim of tending and witnessing. Shape the world — never the people — then ask it why it became what it is, and get the true answer.
Coverage permission
Blanket, standing permission for every creator and outlet. You do not need to ask, and there is nothing to sign.
The only ask: it is Early Access, so please say so, and please say which version you played — the build number is in the bottom corner of the main menu. The game changes most weeks.
Fact sheet
Description
Approved copy. Quote, trim or rewrite it freely; no approval needed either way.
Everyone faces the same Long Winter. What will your hand preserve?
Short version. A god-sim where every spark is a simulated soul. Zoom from one person's life out to a whole world that curls into a torus; raise land, call rain, touch a single fate — and ask any place why it became what it is.
Longer. Vonkelveld is a game of tending and witnessing rather than commanding. You are a force, not a king: you cannot order anyone to do anything. You shape conditions — raise land and sink it, call the rain, warm the air, bless the ground, kindle worship, bring ruin — and then let time run. The people choose for themselves where to settle, when to flee, and who to follow.
Pull back and hearth-lights bloom into villages, villages into cities with real streets. Zoom out further and the map closes into its true torus form. Dive the other way — past the clouds, past the rooftops — and follow one person through their whole life: their family, their needs, their memory, their death.
The Chronicle narrates your world's history as it happens. Point at any place and ask why here, and the game answers with the actual causal chain that produced it, traced back through the years — your acts, the climate, migration, collapse, chance. Not flavour text. The real reasons.
And a world is nothing but a seed plus your choices. Send someone your seed and they play the byte-identical world, so the gap between two players is skill and not luck.
What makes it different
Why-Here returns the real traced causal chain from the world's own Chronicle — not a canned line. The simulation can explain itself.
From a single person's face to the whole torus and back with no loading screen, no mode switch, no seam.
Fixed-point maths everywhere state is kept, so a seed plus your input log replays byte-identically. Same seed, same world, every time — which makes two players' outcomes directly comparable.
Every icon, capsule and splash is a list of drawing primitives rasterised on demand; the sound is synthesized at runtime. The look is arithmetic, not an asset store.
The cold, the flood, the fire — each world's doom arrives. You cannot save everything. The score is what your hand preserved and what it learned to let go.
Colourblind palettes, reduce-flashing and reduce-motion switches, adjustable text size and UI scale, save anytime, no timed input, difficulty you set yourself.
For creators
Every sound in the game — music, ambience, effects — is synthesized at runtime from the game's own primitives. There are no licensed recordings and no samples, so nothing here should mute a VOD or trip a content claim.
Because worlds are deterministic, we can all play the same one. Start The Long Winter and enter the seed vonkelveld — your world will be identical to everyone else's, so your run is directly comparable to theirs.
Cast a shaping verb and watch the prediction rings; let a few years run; dive from the torus down to one lit street; click a town and ask why here; read the answer aloud. That is the whole pitch in one clip.
The demo's guided first act is 25–35 minutes. A full scenario run is open-ended — worlds are played for as long as they last, and the score is how long that was.
Honest notes
It is Early Access, and it means it. The core loop, eleven worlds, the Chronicle and Why-Here all ship today. Updates land weekly or faster. The price rises at 1.0, which is milestone-driven with no fixed date.
Windows only. No macOS or Linux build. It has not been verified on Steam Deck, so please don't describe it as Deck-ready.
Demo saves carry into the full game on the same machine. That carry is local — it does not follow you to another PC.
Content. Worlds end. There is famine, drowning, fire and death, narrated abstractly and without gore. No sexual content. The game is unrated by any board.
Single-player, offline, no DRM beyond Steam, no microtransactions, no online services.
The free demo
The demo is a separate, deliberately bounded build — not a timed trial of the full game. Stated plainly so coverage can be accurate.
A guided world with four divine powers and one story-led moment. After the valley's ordinary ending you can stay on and experiment.
Watcher or Steward, one fixed deterministic seed, seven divine powers. Hold the last lights against the frost until the demo's unresolved cliffhanger.
All eleven worlds instead of two, free seed choice, every difficulty, the full verb set, 32 achievements — and the demo save carries into it on the same machine.
The worlds
Every scenario plays differently because its pressure is different. These are the premises as the game states them.
A young people kindle their first fires in a warming world — but the warmth will not last. A great cooling is coming, and the green country shrinks toward the equator. You cannot save them forever; the cold always wins in the end.
EndureThe same Long Winter, but framed as a trial — and a far swifter one. Left alone, a steeper cold claims the whole world within a few centuries. Can your god-craft hold a living people past the year the ice would otherwise take them?
Endure · swiftThe same long cold closes over the world — but here a great mountain burns. Its breath holds a circle of warmth against the deepening winter, a hearth the ice cannot reach, and the people gather to it as the green country dies around them. How long can a single ember outlast an age of frost?
EndureThe same cold is coming — but slowly, across ages. Generations will live and die in the long warmth before the first frost is even felt, and the green country will retreat by inches, not years. This is a winter measured in epochs.
Endure · epochsThe warmth never fails here — but the ground does. Inch by inch the land settles into the sea, and the coastlines come inward to drown the low country first. The people retreat to the high ground as their world becomes an archipelago, then a scatter of islands, then a memory beneath the waves.
EndureNo cooling comes for this world — the opposite. The sky catches fire and will not stop climbing. At first it is a gift: the frozen poles green, the harvests double, the people multiply beyond counting in a single blazing generation.
EndureA world in balance, and no doom written for it. The warmth holds steady; the green country neither spreads nor shrinks. There is no cold to fight here — only the delicate arithmetic of plenty.
FlourishBegin here. A small people have made their home in a green valley — the thriving heart by the river, and the farms out on the dry fringe. You are the god whose hand can call the rain, green the fields, warm the frost, and raise the hills.
TutorialNo prophecy, no clock, no cold on the horizon. A living world handed to you with a single instruction: shape it. Raise mountains and sink them, call the rain, kindle the worship of a quiet people, and watch what grows.
SandboxA world without edges — sail east far enough and you return from the west; cross the northern ice and the southern ice is the same shore. Here the green belt is a ring, the seas are one ocean, and a people who wander far enough come home. A quiet, edge-less sandbox to shape at your leisure.
SandboxThe world as it is - the old continents in their places, low and wide between the great ranges: the long spine of the Americas, the desert belt of Afric, Eurasia from the western capes to the eastern isles.
SandboxScreenshots
All captured in-engine at native 1080p from the shipping build. Free to use in coverage. Full-resolution PNGs available on request.
Video & assets
The Early Access trailer. Free to embed, clip and use in thumbnails.
youtu.be/dSHtWJsA-pc →Full description, system requirements, and the free demo.
store.steampowered.com →Original 1920×1080 PNGs, capsule art, transparent logo and the icon ladder — ask and they are sent the same day.
Email for the pack →Steam keys for creators and press, and the developer is happy to answer questions on the record.
info@vonkelveld.com →Contact
Vonkelveld is made by Bridgette Graham, working alone under Software MoosS — design, code, worldcraft, art and sound. Interviews, written Q&A and developer commentary are all available; just ask.
Asset licence. Every image and video linked from this page may be reproduced in coverage of Vonkelveld — articles, thumbnails, videos, streams — without further permission. Credit “Vonkelveld / Software MoosS” where a credit is customary. No other use is granted.