I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is officially released today! I started development almost exactly five years ago, and wowowow has the game ever grown up since then!
I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who supported Exocolonist and helped create it. Artists Meilee Chao, Eduardo Vargas, Sarah Webb, Leanne Roed, Sarah Roland, Diego De la Rocha, and our hundred card artsits for making the game so breathtakingly beautiful. Narrative designer Lindsay Ishihiro for making us laugh, cry, and fall in love with their moving prose. Gord, Em and others from A Shell in the Pit Audio, and all of our incredible musicians, for adding another dimension of wonder and beauty to the game.
Thanks to my husband Colin Northway for helping with tricky algorithms and game balancing, and for a tremendous amount of emotional support, idea-bouncing and code checks over the last five years.
Thanks to our publishers Finji, our QA and porting teams, and a very special thank you virtual hug to our incredible beta testers and all of our fans for your support and encouragement. And to my dad, who has logged hundreds of hours living life after life on the planet Vertumna.
Thank you, friends.
Okay enough mushy stuff, it’s release day!
The team and I have been eagerly waiting to open the gates and invite everyone to come explore our beautiful planet Vertumna. I hope you find it as charming, thrilling, moving, and fun as we do, and I can’t wait to hear what sort of Teenage Exocolonist you’ll be.
We’ll be celebrating the release of the official I Was a Teenage Exocolonist soundtrack with a team listening party at 10am PT / 1pm EST / 5pm GMT on August 19th.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (Original Soundtrack) album art by bkomei
Music to accompany every possible you
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist begins when you’re an innocent ten-year-old just taking their first steps on a brand new planet, and ends (if you survive!) when you reach age twenty after many trials and harrowing adventures. The mood of the game changes dramatically as your exocolony is plunged into disaster and loss. Some hardships are preventable, others inevitable no matter how many lives you live.
So it was a challenge to find a soundtrack which could represent that whole spectrum of emotions, and portray all the different people you might become during those ten years: maybe an alien-obsessed bookworm, a brave but pacifist explorer, a high-strung chef, or a kindhearted collector of oddities and odd friends.
One of thirty possible endings: becoming a rebel
Daniel Rosenfeld (aka C418, or “that Minecraft guy”) suggested the best way to represent all these different possible child, teenage, and adult yous would be a soundtrack made by various artists. So with the help of Gordon McGladdery from A Shell in the Pit (who are also doing our audio), I set about recruiting friends and new artists whose style jammed with what I was imagining.
The result is 27 tracks totaling 2 hours, featuring these 14 artists:
Music is a social skill that raises your Creativity stat in the game
I put together a playlist of inspirations with some of my favorite game soundtracks (Stardew Valley, Wandersong, Jettomero, and yes Minecraft), some ambient electronic artists with heavy synths (Boards of Canada, Jean-Michel Jarre, Hologramme, Home), and some cool instruments (Plaid, Four Tet, Rone, Nine Inch Nails). Plus more tinkly piano, new age (Enya!), Beyonce? and Bulgarian choir to keep things weird.
Exocolonist is science fiction after all!
One spooky and melancholy sound I was particularly into was instruments recorded then played backwards, a prompt I gave artists along with the playlist.
I split the soundtrack into 3 parts:
1) First half of the game: innocent, bright and optimistic
2) Second half of the game: moodier, more tense and eerie
3) Exploration biomes: ambient and naturey
Some tracks appear throughout both halves of the game to tie it together. They’re all also divided up by season, matching light piano to the glittering peace of Quiet season, and darker synths to the mysterious tension of Glow season.
The exploration areas where you go to survey, forage or hunt are some of the most beautiful parts of the game, and I felt needed longer more ambient tracks to illustrate how it feels to be away from the bustle of the colony. A friend was discussing modular synths on his stream one day and played a sample of Jogging House‘s YouTube videos:
Jogging House had this wide array of beautiful musical toys with soothing flashing lights, and usually incorporated some kind of analog tape deck for a touch of static-warble effect. It sounded exactly like a peaceful evening on a bluff overlooking a Vertumnan mushwood forest. I was lucky to license six tracks from him, including this one – Pines – which appears during Wet season and one other special place.
These tracks were all pre-released by Jogging House through his electronic label Seil Records. I found another synth artist – Crooked Walking – through the label and we were later delighted to find out not only do we live in the same city, but we bumped into each other at a mutual friends’ event. Small world!
Local Connections
I met another artist busking here in Vancouver. Kiyoshi Iio (Koku) is no only a talented synth composer, he incorporates acoustic instruments including guitar, didgeridoo, and handpan.
Handpan is a relatively new instrument that combines cultural traditions from South Asia and the Caribbean and is associated with travellers and boho culture. Much like the people of Exocolonist, who are sort of a multinational hippie commune with a colony ship.
I think handpan sounds beautiful and ethereal, especially the way Koku plays it. It is a perfect fit for the mysterious beauty of the planet Vertumna.
Game composer and A Shell in the Pit founder Gordon McGladdery was a big part of the album production, from wrangling contracts and advising on edits to mastering tracks, and he wrote the game’s title track. I was stoked he played some morin khuur for it. A Shell in the Pit also did our audio, and some of Em Halberstadt‘s ambient building hums were so melodic they’re featured on the album too. A Shell in the Pit also composed the soundtrack for Wandersong, Rogue Legacy, and worked on sound for Untitled Goose Game and Night in the Woods.
You might recognize other artists from game soundtracks too. C418 of course from Minecraft (he’s also working on an unannounced game with Ivy Road). Pongball from Kunai and Road Warriors, scntfc from JETT and Oxenfree, Ghost Time Games from his own games Jettomero and Tux and Fanny, sintecta from GirlJail and other cool experimental jams, and Rupert Lally and Espen J Jörgensen (now collaborating with Al Diaz) from my game Rebuild 3.
The Finishing Touches
Jake Gauntlett’s beautiful ambient piano fit right in perfectly with all three parts of the soundtrack. The final track was a tough one though. I was looking for a vocal track to play over the end game sequence and credits, where you find out what path you and your friends’ lives take as adults.
Scouring new releases on Bandcamp I found Frances Aravel‘s track The Child You Were on her album Shining Out of the Dark. The melancholy lyrics and grungy guitar rock reminded me of my own teens as a 90’s kid. Take a listen and see if you feel it too:
Lofi Sol
So join us on YouTube on August 19th at 10am PT / 1pm EST / 5pm GMT to hear the rest of the soundtrack in its entirety, and chat with the devs and musicians. The I Was a Teenage Exocolonist soundtrack will be available to stream or buy starting August 19th on Spotify, Youtube Music, iTunes, Bandcamp, and other music platforms.
The game is launching on August 25th to Switch, PS4, PS5, PC, Mac, and Linux. Wishlist it today!
Grow up to be a xenofauna rancher, a roboticist, or a rebel with a cause in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, a card-battling narrative RPG where you live (and die, and re-live) your torrid teenage years in humanity’s first extrasolar colony.
Coming to Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4 and PS5 on August 25th, 2022!
One of the themes of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is exploration and discovery. Both exploring the possibilities of your own life and identity as you grow up and decide who you will be, and exploring a lush and wild alien planet. So I knew from early on in development that the art should be beautiful, and that we needed a strong palette color-coded to the planet Vertumna’s changing seasons.
I met concept artist Sarah Webb at an arts festival where she was showing her comic Kochab, inspired by the beauty of nature in her home of Alaska. Her watercolor style perfectly fit the feel I wanted, to tell the story of people leaving an industrialized Earth behind to return to nature. Artists Meilee Chao, Eduardo Vargas and others deftly picked up this style and brought it to life in the game.
Running through regions and seasons of the planet Vertumna
As the narrative expanded and writer Lindsay Ishihiro joined the team (they also drew the creatures!), it was clear that the character art would be key. Romance was an option after all, so these needed to be characters you could imagine like-liking and eventually falling in love with. Mei knocked the character design out of the park, creating an entire culture for the exocolony with clothing that is a mix of space-age and homespun materials.
I want to own all of their outfits so badly in real life!
The kids are up to some light mischief
Since the game takes place over 10 years, your childhood friends needed to age up with you. Although there is a plenty of innocent fun in the early years, Vertumna is a dangerous place, and the colony’s adults can only shield you from that fact for so long. As you get older, difficult and sometimes traumatic events will change both your friends’ personalities and their appearances.
Anemone age 10-13, 14-16, and 17-19
As you decide what to study or where to work, who to befriend, and whether to help the colony, rebel, or find your own way, your memories take the form of cards in the deckbuilding part of the game. Everything from taking a biology test to battling monstrous xenofauna (or running the heck away from them!) is resolved by choosing up to 5 cards to place in order, with bonuses for adjacent matching colors or numbers.
I’m a big fan of the art in collectible card games like Magic the Gathering, so to add variety we worked with 100 different artists to illustrate over 250 cards. It’s been a ton of fun to see our world and characters through the eyes of all these different artists in their own styles.
The cards feature art from over 100 different artists
Exocolonist’s massive dynamic narrative means you won’t see everything in one life, or even in four or five. And every playthrough will change a little, as memories from past lives trickle in to help or hinder you. Mei has endeavored to illustrate many of the major scenes that could play out, and all the different endings you can reach.
Strife between Rex and Vace
No matter where you end up in the game, we hope you have fun! I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is coming to Steam (and Itch, and other stores), PS4 and PS5 on August 25th, 2022. Wishlist it today!
The Strato kids learn about Earth holidays, by @bkomei
We’re starting to finish up the art for I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, but still have manymany months to go with the writing, card game design, audio, balancing, polish and testing. My TODO list is finally shrinking faster than it is growing! And thanks to Finji taking over some of our social media and bizdev duties, you may hear less from me personally, but it means I can put my head down and focus on the game.
This year has been a serious effing challenge for me, to put it lightly. But my loved ones are healthy and I’ve had so much extra time to put into Exocolonist. I have a lot to be thankful for in 2020.
The Exocolonist team and I are incredibly stoked by our partnership with Bekah, Adam, and the rest of the Finji team. I’ve known them for many years and can’t emphasize enough how much respect I have for Finji as publishers, designers, and leaders in our industry.
Northway Games has always self-published until now, but I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is our biggest game yet, and merits this opportunity to reach a wider audience with Finji leading the way.
Bounce Weasel (an actual creature in our game now, based on the Finji mascot) by @neomeruru
To celebrate, the Exocolonist 2020 demo is live again this week on Steam. Try it out and wishlist the game here.
More changes are coming! We’re moving the Exocolonist Discord server to a channel on the official Finji Discord server (join us there!). And we have a new official @Exocolonist Twitter account for you to follow, run by our new community manager @HarrisFoster and the other good folks at @FinjiCo.
We’ll still be posting major updates here, but for more up to date goings-on, keep an eye on those and the other Finji channels!
