Year in Antarctica is a pixelart simulation developed by me, inspired by the ecosystem dioramas in the 2000s nature encyclopedias I grew up with. It runs right in the browser on SimSpace.
The simulation follows a single year at an emperor penguin colony on the Antarctic coast. There are fifteen species in total, including penguins, seals, seabirds, and the fish, squid, and krill that they all depend on, and I tried to keep every one of them to scale with the others. I looked into how each animal actually behaves and tried to give them as many of their characteristic behaviors as I could, so the emperors huddle together through the winter, the seals haul out onto the ice to rest, and the petrels come in from the sea during the summer.
The ice sheet also gains and recedes over the course of the year, which changes where the animals are able to go and what they are able to do.
It also works as a game. Clicking on an animal for the first time takes a photo of it and adds it to a field notebook called the Antarctican Fauna List, along with the date you found it on. Some of the animals only show up during certain seasons, so finding all fifteen takes some patience.
Play it on SimSpace.