🚀 Celebrate a Year of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist with Vertumnalia Festivities! 🚀
Can you believe it's been a year since Exocolonist blasted its way onto Steam and into our hearts? We're setting out the feast table and building the stage for an exclusive Vertumnalia Festival on the Finji Discord!
🎨 Show off Your Talent
Starting now! Dive into our digital talent showcase:
Showcase your Exocolonist fan art, fiction and cosplay magic.
Culinary wizards, cook up and share dishes inspired by Exocolonist
Send the developers your questions for our upcoming livestream!
🎙 Exclusive Creator's Corner Q&A
Mark your calendars! On August 25, 12PM PDT/3PM EDT, join the minds behind the game:
Interact with Lead Developer Sarah Northway and Writer Lindsay Ishihiro.
Watch as Artist Meilee Chao crafts live Exocolonist art inspired by fan suggestions.
Plus, get a chance to win some Exocolonist goodies including Steam keys, exclusive pins, and rare press kits! Start dropping your questions and artwork ideas in our Discord now.
I am still chasing that sweet green checkbox for being fully verified on Steam Deck. Although those in the know can tell you it plays beautifully on there already, there are some sync issues that could make it annoying to switch between deck and PC and downgrade us to only "playable".
While I was tackling that, I went through all the bug reports you lovely, lovely people have sent through the game's feedback menu (thank you! ːexoflexː) and fixed some small issues with particular cards and rare errors. Here's the list:
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
Plushie survey!
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"?
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
LudoNarraCon Narrative Festival
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!
We also have two Exocolonist-related narrative panels during the event:
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.
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
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!
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
Nominate Us!
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:
(Nomi-Nomi writes a multi-ending visual novel in Exo, because everybody loves a game-within-a-game)
Exocolonist Patch #2 (version 2315) changelog!
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 support@finji.co (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
More award nominations!
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist has been nominated for best Games For Impact in the Game Awards, and best Playstation Game of the Year in the PLAY Magazine awards.
It's a big honor to be included in these shortlists! Seeing our game casually listed beside Elden Ring and God of War is a trip. And yes, these awards are both public ballots so you too can vote for Exocolonist!
The Game Awards winners will be announced in a live ceremony on December 8th at 4:30pm PT / 7:30pm ET.
