The card battling system in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is like a combination of Yahtzee and Magic the Gathering. Or… poker with card abilities!

There are hundreds of cards (which we also call memories), and we need your help to make them look cool! This month we’re looking for 100 artists to draw card art for the game. Details here:

We’re looking for all styles of painting and drawing, and we’d especially love to hear from students, marginalized folks and people outside North America.

Our team artists bkomei and Eduardo Vargas have illustrated a bunch of cards already:

Every card is a memory of something you’ve done in the game, and together your collective experiences are used for everything from fighting monsters to making new friends.

You play a quick one-hand card challenge every month to determine how well you worked or concentrated in school, and longer multi-round challenges to determine the outcome of strife during story events.

If your application is selected, we’ll let you know soon where you can pick your card and get started. Artwork will be due on September 30th. Our budget is $150 usd per piece, which I know might be a lot to some and not much to others.

So if you know an artist who you think would want to be involved, please spread the word and apply here!

Stay tuned to see the results as they come in! (I’m so excited!!) Oh and while you’re waiting, a new Exocolonist demo is available on Steam all this week during Gamescom, ending August 30th!

– Sarah

Primary Skills

Skills are organized into social, mental, and physical suits, which matter mainly for card battles.

It was hard to narrow it down to only 12, so some are a bit overloaded – most knowledge is shoehorned into Engineering (the dry sciences) or Biology (the wet ones), while social sciences, arts and humanities are absorbed into your Creativity skill.

With survival on the line, some skills will come up more than others, like your ability to recognize and and interact with alien species (Animals skill).

Battles and Perks

Battles can challenge any skill, and are played out the same way whether your Combat skill is being tested (eg during sparring practice) or your Engineering skill (eg fixing a robot or taking a math test). Yes, you can even have an Empathy battle! More on battles later…

Once a skill reaches 30%, 60%, or 100%, it will unlock perks which grant permanent effects. Creativity unlocks crafting recipes, Organization lets you equip more gear, Perception makes collectible resources easier to find. Some unlock new career choices, shop items or give you a boost in battles.

I’m still ironing the perks out but they’re going to be cool and help make every playthrough different.

Kudos, Happiness and Rebellion

Three skills are different:

Kudos is the game’s currency – a virtual coin used mainly to reward children. For the most part the colonists don’t use money and instead share resources according to need (yeah… they’re Space Commies). But when someone goes the extra mile, or your kid finally cleans up their bedroom without having to be asked, it’s customary to say thanks with a few kudos. They can be spent in the supply depot on small luxuries like candy and fancy clothes.

Stress increases when you work, battle, explore, do just about anything. Too much and your performance suffers. It can be reduced by spending time relaxing.

Rebellion and Loyalty are at opposite ends of the same dial. It starts in the middle, and is affected by how you deal with authority. Neither rebellion or loyalty is inherently good or bad, but if the dial swings far to one side or the other it will close some event options and special endings and open others.

Colony Stats

The colony itself has hidden stats like Food, Defense, and Morale. These are directly affected by your actions – every time you forage for a new edible plant, or help repair an automated turret, or perform a particularly beautiful song on your photophonor. But you’re just one child and I don’t want to overstate your importance, so they’ll either be tucked away or hidden completely.

Although your actions may affect whether your colony survives, thrives, or fails, Exocolonist isn’t a colony simulator so much as an RPG. You’ll have your hands full managing one teenager’s skills, equipment, and future.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.