I Was a Teenage Exocolonist News

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist Patch #3, version 2716 (March 16) is up now on Steam!

This build restores some accidentally lost content, adds custom cursors, fixes issues with equipment bonuses and some statuses, and a bunch more small issues and typos.

• store hogs in save files and offer to restore if Groundhogs.json corrupt
  
• improve loading an age 11+ game in a demo version
  
• custom cursors, can be disabled via settings, bigger on 4k
  
• better fix for cards getting stuck
  
• redirecting thumper now adds to defense one time
  
• immediately skip current card challenge when you disable it via tutorial
  
• show card art and text in controller tooltips that include both
  
• strip exoscript markup from all user-entered names
  
• fix starting the game in controller mode with no controller plugged in
  
• fix hitting home with H hotkey while entering name if input box loses focus
  
• fix feedback menu truncating jankily after 13 lines
  
• fix tooltips disappearing too fast when using mouse and keyboard together
  
• fix steam deck tutorial where it says "click" so we can finally be verified
  
• fix disabling past lives with negative checks
  
• fix WAKE UP font being huge sometimes
  
• fix medallion and other gear bonuses that should only be on the first round
  
• fix becoming enlightened after first or second perk with gear skill bonuses
  
• fix fillbars not showing changes when gear bonuses push skill over 100
  
• fix autosaving when returning from an expedition before the date changes
  
• fix showing -15 when you have net +0 skill change and gear equipped
  
• fix calm and starving statuses not affecting skill changes
  
• fix not showing skill bonus info in bubble tooltip when net is +0
  
• fix remove incrementMonth to keep from skipping important events
  
• fix opening credits menu during ending doesn't let you close it again
  
• fix upgrading hopeye
  
• fix missing skill card sub-events for vace/rex/nomi/sym
  
• fix old sol not saying interesting things about many endings
  
• a regular helping of narrative fixes and typos
  

Another giant thank you to everyone who reported bugs from inside the game's feedback menu! I couldn't have found these without you! ːexoflexː

- Sarah

Big news - I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a finalist for Excellence in Narrative at the IGF (Independent Games Festival) (plus an honorable mention for Visual Arts!).



Not only that, our game has also been nominated for Best Narrative in the GDCA (Game Developers Choice Awards - these are like the Oscars of video games)



AND we're a finalist for the Social Impact Award in the GDCAs.



These are the big ones; the awards that devs (speaking of myself here) spend their entire career working towards. It is an incredible honor to be nominated.

The IGF also features an audience award, so jump in and cast your vote here!

Since our narrative design is getting so much attention, here's an article I wrote for gamedeveloper.com about The Narrative Octopus of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. If you'd like to play around with Exo's custom scripting language yourself, I've made a rough version of Exoscript open source on Github.

- Sarah ːnyaaː

To celebrate the Steam Winter Sale (December 22nd - January 5th), I Was a Teenage Exocolonist will be 20% off. We'll also be streaming the official soundtrack here for your listening enjoyment (yes, the soundtrack is also on sale!).

The soundtrack features 2 hours of music by 14 incredible artists:

Gordon McGladdery (A Shell in the Pit)
Daniel Rosenfeld (C418)
Shannon Mason (Pongball)
Andrew Rohrmann (scntfc)
Gabriel Koenig (Ghost Time Games)
sintecta
Kiyoshi Iio (Koku)
Al Diaz, Rupert Lally and Espen J Jörgensen
Boris Potschubay (Jogging House)
Tim Rich (Crooked Walking)
Jake Gauntlett
Frances Aravel
Colin Northway
Em Halberstadt

For more about the music of Exocolonist, I wrote a whole dang blog post about it here.

- Sarah

Steam Awards nominations are now open! Time to let the world know about your favorite games released in the last year. Final voting will be held during the Steam winter sale.

You can nominate I Was a Teenage Exocolonist for any category, but you can only pick one. How abouuuuuut Outstanding Story-Rich Game? Lindsay and I are so proud of our dynamic storytelling in Exocolonist. It's 600,000 words (that's like 6 novels!) of complex triggered events and choices that really matter.

Here's a GameDeveloper article I wrote about our custom scripting language and how we wove it all together:

Deep Dive: Using Exoscript to tame the "Narrative Octopus" of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist



(Nomi-Nomi writes a multi-ending visual novel in Exo, because everybody loves a game-within-a-game)

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist Patch #2, version 2315 (November 15th) is up now on Steam!

More typos and a few bugs with gear and collectibles squashed. Patch notes:

• fix double-equipping gear when upgrading, not being able to equip
  
• fix crystal cluster making cards unselectable in controller mode
  
• fix negative skill bonuses for statuses (mourning, injured etc)
  
• fix (hopefully) can't drag battle cards in mouse mode
  
• fix (maybe) groundhogs steam sync issue, stop saving on game exit
  
• fix gear menu card scaling in biggerMenus mode
  
• fix some job start events that weren't high priority
  
• fix a bunch of references after you preempt famine
  
• move hard-coded english strings into localization tsv for modding
  
• buncha typos
  

One bug I'm hoping to (maybe) fix with this update is an issue where past memories are disappearing (characters from the main menu, endings and achievements in the gallery). This might be due to a Steam sync issue reverting the file Groundhogs.json. If you think this might still be happening to you with the new version 2315, please report it from inside the game, and if possible please also email your Steam cloud_log.txt and cloud_log previous.txt files to [email protected] (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\logs on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/logs on MacOS, ~/.local/share/Steam/logs on Linux).

Another issue I haven't been able to track down is fast-disappearing tooltips. They're supposed to stick around under your mouse, not disappear after a second! If this is happening to you (especially if you can figure out why!) please report it from inside the game.

Thank you for all your help!
- Sarah ːnyaaː