This game started out as an idea to make a single-screen survival game.
The mechanics revolved around balancing staying warm and dry inside with the need to gather resources to stem the collapse of your roofs against an onslaught of snow.

We're a two man team, one of which has never tried to make a game before, and this proved to be quite a bit of work. What we ended up with isn't quite a game, but might be sandboxy enough.

The attached "tech demo" should run anywhere there is Java.

EDIT: I've changed 2 things:
1. the camera doesn't zoom in for building
2. you can't build at night

Most of the "features" were bugged because their physics bodies were mispositioned by scaling. The change wasn't significant, but was more than a typo. I feel we aren't in the runnings for anything serious, so I've changed the download link.

You can get the original, buildings off the screen version here:
http://cl.ly/162G1w2Y2I3Z

Controls:
A - left
D - right
W or Space - jump

Left click - place selected buildable

Snow intensity is random and ramps up at night.

Built pieces don't break and can't be removed.

Cold was supposed to be based on how far you had moved through snow piles, but this system was replaced with snowflake damage so the demo player could die.

Fires didn't make it, but were close to implementation and would warm the player up, while providing some melting heat to snow piles

I hope to write a decent post mortem once I've rested from this ordeal :P