I Was a Teenage Exocolonist News

Would you like a real-life squeezable Cal? A huggable squiggly Vriki? We're still in the early planning phases but we'd like to bring an Exocolonist character into the world as a stuffed toy.



The burning question is... which one??

Don't think of this as a "which is your favorite Exo character" quiz; think of it as "who would look coolest as a teddy bear version of themselves" or maybe "what would I be the least embarrassed to put on my bedroom shelves"?

Yes, Vace is on the list. For some reason.

Here is the Google Forms survey.

All questions optional and anonymous. Tell us what you want, and we will do our best to make it happen!

Also! There is a small Patch #4 coming soon to Steam, and now up on the testing beta branch. Feel free to take it for an early spin! Here are the changes:

• Typos typos teh-zypos! ("only" 20 of them)
  
• Make Small Skills Boost perk and Clear Minded status roll their chances separately instead of adding them together in a confusing way
  
• Fix Bravely Helping to Fight and other +1 to total cards showing bonus beside the total, but not actually adding it to the total on rounds 2 and 3
  
• Fix Tracking the Airsquid card text to explain it only affects physical cards
  
• Confirmation dialog when forgetting or not forgetting a card while relaxing, so it's much harder to skip by that option by accident
  
• Warn in a popup the first five times any file fails to save during each play session
  
• Slightly speed up first game boot after install or update (stop unnecessarily recompiling story files)
  
• Fix controllers not closing text input popups on Steam Deck
  
• Hide resolution and quality settings on Steam Deck and stop syncing them between deck and pc, just default to what works best on that specific hardware
  

- Sarah ːnyaaː

The narrative games festival LudoNarraCon will run from May 4th - 8th right here on Steam. This is your chance to check out what is new and upcoming in narrative games, and get I Was a Teenage Exocolonist at limited time discount!



[h2]We also have two Exocolonist-related narrative panels during the event:[/h2]

Lindsay's is at 1pm PDT on Thursday May 4th. They'll be discussing whether a game narrative needs words with Tunic creator Andrew Shouldice.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/33025617/view/3710443172337737687

Mine is at 1pm PDT on Friday May 5th: a sit down with some very cool fellow devs to chat about systems-based narrative writing.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/33025617/view/3710443172337887533?l=english

- Sarah ːnyaaː

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