I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist will be released on August 25 2022!

Spend your teenage years on an alien planet in this narrative deckbuilding RPG with a timeloop twist. Explore, grow up, and fall in love, over and over and over. The choices you make and skills you master over ten years will determine the course of your life and the survival of your colony.

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15 skills - will you focus on empathy and organization, or train up your toughness and bravery?
1000 story events - too much to experience in one lifetime, but luckily you'll have many.
25 jobs - goof off behind the counter as a depot clerk, or join a survey team and chart the Valley of Vertigo.

10 dateable characters - dogboys, aliens, hot politicians and cold-as-ice killers. Can you guess what your childhood friends will grow up to be?
200 battle cards - loosely based on poker rules, make the best hand from cards like Up to your Knees in Mud (adjacent cards get +1) and Testing on Humans (cards to the right become blue)
50 endings - find every way to die, aim to become Governor one day, or live a simple life as a botanist and let others take care of the monster-slaying.

Warning: This game deals with mature subjects and may not be suitable for all players. Please see our content warnings for more info.

Exocolonist is coming to the Nintendo Switch!

7 July 2022, 8:00 am

There is a special feeling to seeing one of my games on a new device for the first time.

I started porting Exo to the Switch over Christmas and it was magical running around, dragging cards, hearing the sounds and music on a device in my hands. I’ve wanted to show you this for so long! Here is me playing the very first working build:

First time running Exo on the Switch!

Since then, with the help of Finji QA and 22nd Century Toys, we got it working on the PS4 and PS5 with smooth controls and a bigger more readable UI for all platforms. It looks gorgeous, friends! You’re going to love it on your platform of choice.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist will launch on August 25 2022!

Platforms are (this is the complete list for launch, finally): Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Mac, and Linux. You will find it on Steam, Itch.io, Humble, and Epic.

The art of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Coming to Steam and Playstation on August 25th, 2022!

28 June 2022, 8:00 am

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 — 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.

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.

Exocolonist card game — 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.

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!