I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is available now!

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.

For more news, check the Presskit, Devlog, Twitter or join the mailing list:

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.

Awards Season for Exocolonist!

26 January 2023, 3:21 pm

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 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.

Earlier we had the honor to be nominated for Best Storytelling in the 2022 Golden Joystick Awards, Games For Impact at The Game Awards (their most misguided category according to Kotaku), Best Playstation Game of the Year in the PLAY Magazine Awards. Back in 2020 I Was a Teenage Exocolonist won the IndieCade award for Procedural Design. And honestly? I’m cool with our nomination for “most pretentious indie game” in 4chan’s Vidya Gaem awards. That’s how you know you’ve really made it.

Since I am linking links, Northway Games has been in the IGF before: Incredipede for Visual Art in 2013, and Fantastic Contraption VR for Nuovo in 2016, and Deep Under the Sky had an honorable mention for Audio in 2015. But this is the first time one of my games has made it, and I am on cloud nine!

More posts at NorthwayGames.com

Instagram Feed - latest #exocolonist posts from @SarahNorthway

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