Author: Sarah Northway

  • Sol was a Teenage Exocolonist

    Sol was a Teenage Exocolonist

    Sol, aged 17-19

    Sol – full name Solanaceae – is the default name of your character in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.

    Your parents are farmers, and they named you after their favorite taxonomic family, the nightshades, which contains potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tobacco.

    Flulu and Geranium, your parents

    You are your father’s Little Tomatillo, his Brave Gooseberry, his Spunky Petunia, and his Busy Aubergine. Your dad’s a sweetheart… but a little embarrassing.

    Your mom’s the realist of the family, always trying to get you to work hard and toughen up. You may butt heads with her, but it’s usually for your own good. It’s your choice whether you take her advice, or roll your eyes and fidget like a proper teenager.

    Sol, age 14-16

    Exocolonist starts with a short character generation which takes place during the first ten years of your life on the colony ship Stratospheric before it lands. You choose your name, your gender (two sliders for appearance and pronouns) and a genetic modification.

    Before the colonists left Earth, they “acquired” valuable gene editing tech to give themselves an edge on their new planet. All the colony children have one augmentation. You can pick:

    PerkSkillEffect
    Extra fingerscreativity + 10Increase Creativity and Organization faster
    Eagle eyesperception + 10Increase Perception faster, events while exploring
    Absorbent brainreasoning + 10Increase Reasoning, Biology, Physics faster
    Super strengthcombat + 10Increase Toughness and Combat faster
    Calm temperamentempathy + 1025% less Stress
    Nothing at allkudos + 3025% more Kudos because you tried your best

    Through a series of other choices you pick your childhood best friend, starting skills, and early childhood memories. These memories take the form of cards.

    A child’s first memories (temporary art)

    More about these cards and Sol’s list of skills in future posts!

  • Growing Up in Exocolonist

    Growing Up in Exocolonist

    When you get down to it, the point of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is to grow up.

    It’s how you win the game, or, depending on your goals, how you lose it. The game starts shortly after your 10th birthday. The colony ship you’ve lived on your whole life has finally landed and you step out to breathe real air for the first time.

    It ends on your 20th birthday, or earlier if you’re less fortunate. When this happens, The question is not just what have you accomplished but who have you become?

    You age 10 with your parents

    Many games ask this question. Particularly RPGs, but really anything involving stats or leveling or equipment is fundamentally about becoming something more than you were. Exocolonist isn’t just about picking one path and excelling at it, but about discovering all the different paths and ways to grow up on a strange and dangerous alien planet.

    Every choice you make in Exocolonist advances time by one week. On the planet Vertumna there are 4 (very long) weeks per season, and 5 seasons per year.

    Seasons: Quiet, Pollen, Dust, Wet, and Glow

    The name Vertumna comes from the Roman god Vertumnus; the god of seasons, change, and growth. His name comes from the Latin verb vertere – “to change” – which is the root of words like diverge, weird, universe, and wormhole.

    See? I thought about it.

    Marz and Cal age 10-13, 14-16, 17-20

    In Exocolonist, you won’t be the only one who ages over the course of the game. Your childhood friends (or not-so-friends) from the ship will grow and change along with you. Anemone, Cal, Tammy, Marz, Dys and his sister Tangent. Their own dramas play out over those 10 years whether you witness them or not. Your involvement may change the course of their lives for better or worse, but you won’t have time to befriend everyone.

    This is how it usually goes with dating sims. Yes, you can hook up with a bunch of different people. But finding every ending won’t be that trivial. There are disasters to prevent (or cause), mysteries to unravel, and a large number of career paths to follow. Your skills factor into these, so which activities you spend your time on are as important as the decisions you’ll make.

    Rebuild 3 has some very difficult to get events, and Exocolonist will too.

    In the tradition of Rebuild 3, there will be a hard to get “good” ending that requires not just the right balance of skills and “right place, right time”, but the combined knowledge of many past lives.

    Because each time you reach age 20 and start a new game, you’ll remember certain things that happened before. In the code I call these memories “groundhogs”, a reference to everyone’s favorite bill Murray movie. They manifest as premonitions or memories of things that will happen… or at least could happen if you don’t act to change them.

    More on this to come!

  • Exocolonist as a painting

    Exocolonist as a painting

    Background by Sarah Webb, characters by Meilee Chao and Lindsay Ishihiro

    The art of Exocolonist has been getting so much positive feedback! Folks dig it.

    It’s been a long road. When I started this game I had the audacious idea that I’d do the art myself. I amassed a considerable Pinterest mood board, collecting any picture that felt like part of the Exocolonist art puzzle. I went through a phase of thinking it might look like a campy pulp fiction cover crossed with child’s finger painting (but with glitter!).

    My Pinterest mood board featured Captain Venture, Hundertwasser, and Bjork

    I spent weeks trying to find a style that I could do quickly with my limited abilities, but as the project grew and the idea of dateable characters became a must-have, I realized I didn’t have the skills to draw characters you could fall in love with (or be remotely attracted to). Plus it would have added more time to an already long development schedule. But some of the creatures were cool.

    My original art style tests

    I decided it’d be best to find someone who already worked in the style I was looking for, whatever that was. I went hunting. I found Sarah Webb at the VanCAF comic fest where she was showing Kochab. I loved her environments, her casual but undeniably living line work, and her rich color schemes. I’d never seen anyone who could make snow so colorful.

    Sarah soon joined on to work on the concept art and help find a style that was both hers and Exocolonists’.

    Sarah Webb’s concept art for Quiet season

    I loved that Sarah did some of her work with pencil and watercolor, and other times it was completely digital, and hard to tell the difference. This was the look I wanted, both for the fullscreen illustrations and the environments on the area maps where you run around between events. Sarah shared her Photoshop brushes and techniques for getting that look.

    Next Meilee Chao came on to design and illustrate our characters (more on them in future posts) and has also done a fantastic job adapting the concept art to a waving, breathing alien jungle. It’s like talking a stroll through a watercolor painting.



    I added a wave shader, particles, fog, and depth blur to the 2d sprites in Pollen season

    We haven’t shied away from the colors pink and purple in this game, even though I’ve been known to personally reject them as “too girly” in my own life and wardrobe. Exocolonist isn’t meant to appeal only to women; I just think it’s a cool and underused palette. It also fits the science: most plants on the planet Vertumna photosynthesize using a red pigment instead of a green one.

    I’ll talk about other aspects of the art – the characters, creatures, 3d elements, and UI – in future posts. For now I’ll leave you with our newest team member Eduardo Vargas’ event backgrounds. Sarah Webb has moved on to other projects, but Ed is doing a fantastic job matching her style!

  • Background illustrator needed!

    Update: We’ve received a surprising number of submissions from many many talented artists! I’m going to shut this down while we go through them all. Thanks everyone for spreading the word!

    Exocolonist is looking for an illustrator for contract work. Mainly to work on the background art for dialog scenes. Sarah Webb started us off with plenty of amazing concept art, as well as part of the backgrounds we need. We were sad to see her go – you can follow her exciting new work at Cartoon Network here!

    So we are looking to match an existing style:

    Beautiful, right? I love these sooooo much.

    There are another 20-30 illustrations left to do (more if we have to redraw the existing ones). This might be something like 3-6 months of full time work, or up to a year part time, working remotely.

    Update: I’ll let you know when we have new background art to show!

  • Inspirations for Exocolonist

    It’s been a year since I announced I’m working on I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, and may be another year yet before you can play it. But it’s about time I tell you a little more about it… starting with what inspired me to make it in the first place.

    Let me tell you about my favorite Japanese game series, Princess Maker:

    Princess maker 1
    Princess maker, Gainax, 1991

    I’ve gushed about these games before. I admit it – I’m obsessed with them.

    You play the adopted parent of a girl who could grow up to be anything – not just a princess, though that’s a traditional goal. You manage her time, scheduling her school or work or leisure activities every month.

    Babysitting in PM2

    Babysitting in PM2
    Babysitting and magic training in Princess Maker 2

    It’s a life sim game, and though it seems like every franchise from Assassin’s Creed to GTA is part life simulator now, there’s something especially charming to raising a character with skills like Temperament and Decorum and Housework, who might never touch a weapon or have an adventure in her life and might grow up to be a farmer or an innkeeper.

    And that’s just fine.

    Princess Maker 3
    Princess Maker 3 endings

    Yeah… your little girl could also become a sexy sorceress or a prostitute. Or marry you, her own father. Titillating! Sexist!! But in other ways open minded, empowering, and empathetic, especially in the later games in the series.

    I used fan patches and clumsy auto-translation software to play the Princess Maker games (which are now on Steam, although the official translations aren’t great). I ate up games inspired by them like Cute Knight and Long Live the Queen from the distinguished Georgina Bensley (Hanako Games).

    Emotions matter in Long Live the Queen
    Emotions are key in Long Live the Queen by Hanako Games

    There’s been a spate of magical-boarding-school inspired ones, including Magical Diary (also Hanako – with a sequel coming soon), Academagia, and Littlewitch Romanesque, which are interesting because I prototyped something similar myself in 2008 (then made Rebuild 1 instead).

    More recently I’ve been playing the painfully true-to-life Chinese Parents which adds a factor of emotional abuse the child must endure as they study for exams.

    Thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad
    Thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad…
    Not you too Mom!
    Not you too Mom!

    What I love about these games isn’t the fantasy of actually being a parent (no thanks!). It’s the idea of living a life in a small span of time, and seeing how it turns out, then doing it again.

    I can trace my love of life sims back further, past The Sims and the Creatures games and the original Tamagotchi, to a funny Sierra game called Jones in the Fast Lane from the early 90s. It was loosely based on board games like the Game of Life: you go to school, get a job, eat fast food and try to acquire stuff in the cynical modern world. The CD version had hilarious voice acting from the Sierra staff that is forever ingrained in my head.

    Jones in the Fast lane, Sierra, 1990

    I Was a Teenage Exocolonist has its roots in simulated life games like these. It has other elements too: visual novel, collectible card game… but in the Exocolonist code the main character class file is named ‘Princess.cs’ as a nod to Princess Maker and these other games.