Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTL-zV_LNjwyiNWV79y0I-2WmgvnTJ7SmlR5g25E41UHsbgoruzJT0fYoBbppsBdNr7ehtqhulMfXoU/pub

Have you checked that your GDD is publicly accessible ?
Yes

Is your game set to public on itch.io so we can see it?
Yes

Summarize your game!
The Long Winter is a turn-based narrative choice game. You drive a cart north through an early, unrelenting winter, away from a home that no longer exists. Across 12 legs of the journey, the road makes a demand almost every mile, a broken wheel, a wolf pack, a fever, a frozen river, and you choose how to pay it: from your dwindling supplies, from yourself, or from one of six passengers riding with you, each with a name and a few lines of who they are.

Controls are just point-and-click: read the event, pick a choice. There's no combat and no timer, the only failure state is a gauge hitting zero. The whole run plays out on one evolving screen: no scene transitions between legs.

A run takes about 5 to 10 minutes and ends in either arrival, with an ending shaped by what and who you sacrificed to get there, or collapse.

Please explain how your game fits the theme.
My take on "The Cost of Progress" is literal and mechanical, not just narrated. Progress is the cart moving forward, mile by mile, toward a pass that might not even be worth reaching. Cost is never flavor text, every leg genuinely takes something from you: a resource, a piece of yourself, or someone in your care. There's no free option, and no way to "win" without paying.

The nuance I was going for is complicity, not tragedy imposed on the player. Costs escalate slowly enough that each individual choice feels small and reasonable on its own, "you didn't want to drain your Hope, but the supplies were already gone, so what else could you do?". It's only across all the journey, especially at the ending screen's tally of what was burned and who was left behind, that you realize how much you agreed to pay just to keep moving.

Did you use Generative AI to make any assets in your game?
No