I Was A Teenage Exocolonist creator Sarah Northway on shaping the LGBTQ+ sci-fi RPG
Picture this: you’re 10 years old and you’ve just begun your new life on an alien planet with the rest of your colony. The endgame for you is to get to your 20s and put your mark on the world… Only, the world you live in is a terrifying place, and a couple of wrong moves mean certain doom. Yet instead of a game over screen, you pick yourself up and start again. Welcome to I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, a sci-fi RPG from Northway Games.
Set to release on August 25th this year, I Was A Teenage Exocolonist puts players into the role of a young child just starting their life on a new and dangerous planet. You’re joined by a colourful cast of characters – your friends, bullies, parents, teachers, and more – as you continue your adventure.
How you do that is highly dependent on your choices, and each choice you make will have consequences, positive, negative, or a bit of both. Yet, even with the dangers and thrills that surround the player character, the main objective of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is to live your life. Life Sims has increasingly become a format used by developers to allow their players to take control and navigate a queer narrative, with examples like Growing Up from Vile Monarch, Stardew Valley from ConcernedApe and the ever-popular The Sims from EA.
However, what inspired I Was A Teenage Exocolonist was something else entirely: Princess Maker. In this series, players take on the role of a parental figure who must guide and raise a young girl throughout all stages of their life. “Except instead of you raising a little girl you are the person who’s the child growing up and trying to figure out who you’re going to be,” creator Sarah Northway tells Gayming Magazine. The player still has the power to a certain extent, but this time? You’re in the firing line if it all goes wrong.
Unlike other life sims, the customization of the protagonist in this game is very limited. Northway explains that the reason for this was largely due to it being too much effort in a game that already has a thousand different choices and more than a handful of illustrations. “We wanted to have a lot of illustrations that feature the main character and it was just too much effort to let you change your hair, or your skin tone, or whatever. So the only thing that changes is your gender expression.” They continue, “So you can be like femme, or masculine, or gender-neutral, and it changes your hair length and your cleavage and stuff, but in subtle ways.” This can be tweaked via sliders so that there’s no stereotypical ‘look’ for the main protagonist and conveys that your identity is a spectrum, not something that’s able to be placed in three, rigid boxes.
There will also be the use of pronouns, which are able to be customised by the player. You’ll even be able to customise things such as being called ‘an uncle’ instead of an aunt, and vice versa, if you so choose. And, just because we didn’t mention it before, players are also able to change their name. So, regardless of who you are, Northway Games wants you to have a way of exploring the narrative and RPG elements of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist in a way that’s meaningful.
Due to the game being set in the future, characters all have genetic enhancements thanks to technology. During your character creator, you can pick a genetic enhancement, such as dog ears for example, or be brawnier, more intelligent, and there are even more subtle examples where you can never lose your cool, and are steadfast. But one of the more intriguing enhancements is that there are characters who are able to use the technology to choose the gender they wanted to be.
“There’s a few plotlines where you learn about how that [transitioning] was for them,” Northway says. “Being a kid, deciding that they wanted to do this, and then just getting to be who they wanted to be. […] It makes me very hopeful for a future where that will be an option for kids someday.”
Outside of your gender identity, Northway Games has included a total of 10 different love interests for players to get closer to during their adult years. Previously the decision was to make each character have their own defined sexuality, locking them out of romances with the protagonist depending on the different choices you make in how you present yourself. Ultimately, however, the team decided against it.
“We discussed it, Me and Lindsay Ishihiro, our other writer. I wanted to have the Dragon Age style, where some characters are just like ‘I’m only into girls, I’m sorry,’ but Lindsay convinced me to just make everyone down for everything.” Northway says. “The only restrictions to dating are social ones. If someone starts dating another character, it’s hard to come between them. They won’t want to just dump a person for you.”
With restrictions on who you can romance depending on your choices, rather than your gender, it allowed the team at Northway Games to explore relationships that aren’t always connected to the main protagonist, while also showcasing that the world of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is still inherently queer. For example, there are 3 to 4 trans characters, as well as five gay relationships, and as Northway tells us, there are a couple of characters who are also polyamorous. So, even if you decide to play the game as a cis, heterosexual man or woman, the world around you won’t necessarily reflect the cis and heterosexual norm.
Being set in the future, Northway Games wanted to tackle hard subjects without having marginalized players deal with in their everyday life, such as homophobia, racism, sexism, etc. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any issues to be had for players as they go throughout their life. Northway explains that not only will players have to decide where they stand with different groups of people, but they’ll also need to fight back against a fascist government too, which comes with its own tense and heavy moments.
Ultimately though, the goal for Northway Games is to allow players to explore a narrative-heavy sci-fi world that they’ll want to come back to again and again – whether that be to try out a different job, romance someone else, or get an ending that they’ve not seen before. Regardless, everyone is welcome in this queer, sci-fi RPG.
I Was A Teenage Exocolonist releases on August 25 2022 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and Linux.
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