The Winterbourne Babysitter is a single-player web-browser-hosted game set in an allegorical fantasy village scene based on the winterbourne chalk streams. The village residents are made up of the whimsical biodiversity that can be found in such a place. Players enter the game as a tiny humanoid dragon, a Kobold, that’s been enlisted to help take care of the villager’s eggs during the drought season. However, when climate change begins to negatively impact the weather conditions, the player must begin to battle against the unpredictability of nature to ensure the community continues to thrive.
During the non-drought phase of the game, the player needs to gather resources within the limited time available to them. In the early stages of the game, the non-drought phase will be much longer, roughly spanning 16 to 20 in-game days. This is to allow the player enough time to gather these resources on their own. As seen in the figure below, a player can make a single fan in 6 in-game days or a single blanket in 3 in-game days. After the first drought phase is completed, the player unlocks the ability to recruit other villagers to aid them in their mission. For every additional recruit a player gets, they can make an additional item during that time frame (i.e., 2 recruits and a player will be able to make 3 fans in 6 in-game days).
Each egg a player is tasked with caring for over the drought period represents the future of its species. In the case a player is unsuccessful in maintaining the comfort threshold of an egg within its boundaries, the egg will die, thus, resulting in the specific species ceasing to exist in the community. For every egg that a player successfully cares for up until the end of the drought period, this will increase the chances of them having more than one egg of a particular species to care for in the next drought period. More eggs of different varieties signify a thriving community that the player has been responsible for. The lose condition occurs when the player fails to protect the eggs during the drought phases thus causing a mass extinction of all the different species living there.
To improve their chances of protecting all the eggs, the player can attempt to recruit additional aid to acquire more resources. However, recruiting helpers will not be a simple process, especially when a player has recently lost an egg during the drought period. Their persuasiveness will depend on how successful they’ve been in safeguarding eggs during the most recent drought. The probability of recruitment success will be calculated based on the ratio of how many eggs survived with the overall number of eggs present at the beginning of the drought.
In addition to the above, recruiting villagers can potentially unlock the game’s subtle win condition that’s designed to highlight the importance of the climate action SDG. Players will need to have recruited a total of 5 helpers over the course of the game to trigger the win condition wherein Mr Trutta will inform the player that the community’s efforts in protecting the eggs have gone viral and external researchers and engineers are looking to help by building them a new and improved nursery that’s adaptable to ongoing drought conditions.
The final challenge, however, is that this takes time; approximately 2 alternating cycles. Thus, to successfully protect the community and win the game, the player must survive two more drought phases once they’ve unlocked the win condition. This creates a high-level rewards mechanism wherein the case a player successfully saves more eggs, they increase their likelihood of recruiting additional aid which ultimately results in an overall heightened chance of them successfully saving the entire village by triggering the win condition.