Exclusive: Snowtracked Creator Viktor Jonsson on Reactive Snow and Player-Driven Chaos

Snowtracked is not interested in quests, survival meters or monsters. The upcoming indie game instead asks players to step into a quiet winter landscape, push through deep snow, leave trails behind and build whatever they want from sticks. Following the game’s appearance at the gaming conference Gamescom where many gaming trends where showcased this year, SPIELTIMES reached out to solo developer Viktor Jonsson to learn how its unusual snow technology and deliberately unstructured play came together.

Turning Childhood Wonder Into Gameplay

Planned for release on PC via Steam in 2026, Snowtracked can be played alone or in online co-op with up to four players. Its open environment offers lakes, mountains and forests to explore, with walkie-talkies helping separated players stay in contact. Tracks left in the snow can also lead players back home, or become drawings of their own.

The game’s small interactions support that premise: players can throw snowballs into lakes, smash ice into shards, vault over fallen trees and use their own footprints as navigational markers. Its stick-by-stick construction system similarly avoids predefined structures, leaving the purpose of each creation to the player.

For Jonsson, the project began with a feeling rather than a conventional gameplay pitch. He described experiencing “serene bliss” in beautiful snowy environments since childhood. When he recreated such an environment virtually, it produced the same sense of elation.

“As long as you can do things, and the game responds, you are playing something,” Jonsson told SPIELTIMES. “Snow very much reacts to everything you do, so I just had to recreate that.”

Making snow react convincingly, however, became one of the project’s biggest technical game development challenges. Player interactions need to visibly alter the snow, and those changes must be saved without undermining performance. Jonsson also explained that the snow is not treated as an ordinary solid collider. Instead, it behaves as a soft surface that players can move through, adding another layer of complexity to traversal and interaction.

I can let players have fun and chaos, if they create it themselves, it will be a good kind of chaos!

Viktor Jonsson

Gamescom Players Embraced the Chaos

Gamescom gave Jonsson an opportunity to watch a broad group of players encounter those systems for themselves. What surprised him most was how closely their responses matched the experience he hoped to create. Players who connected with Snowtracked appeared to connect strongly, while the building system produced the most memorable reactions.

Jonsson said the reactions to the building system were the most enjoyable to observe, especially when he could “see people light up the moment when they understood how it worked.”

Jonsson received “tonnes of feedback” during the event and expects to make numerous changes as a result. Encouragingly, he said much of that feedback concerned additions that should fit naturally into the existing design rather than requiring the game to abandon its identity.

The four-player co-op gives players an open landscape and a construction system, could this threaten peaceful exploration? Jonsson does not consider that a problem he needs to prevent.

“I can let players have fun and chaos,” he said. “If they create it themselves, it will be a good kind of chaos.”

At the same time, he expects the world itself to shape the rhythm of multiplayer sessions. Even when friends scatter, build strange structures and create their own distractions, the winter environment should naturally pull play back toward moments of calm and wonder.

Those who liked it, really liked it. The reactions to the building system was the most fun to observe, to see people light up the moment when they understood how it worked!

Viktor Jonsson

That balance appears central to Snowtracked game development: its world is peaceful without dictating how players must behave. Instead, the snow remembers where players have been, while the building system gives them a reason to stop and leave something behind.

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