iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 1h

Here's some pics! Lots to see in this'n!

a dark room with towers of old books and single lit candle and a bunch of not lit candles.

some strange totem in a metalic, geometric landscape

A market or something on the left, colorful beads dangle from a cave entrance.

collapsed infrastructure in an overgrown bog.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

like look at these fake views. so mysterious. and honestly kinda on theme for the game if the bots are enjoying it

200 or so views every day according to this chart, but nothing in referrals. Why?

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

my twine game "Four Letters" has been getting hundereds of fake bot views a day according to Itch, but almost no actual engagement or plays. 200 AI data scrapers cant be wrong, play now: ergman.itch.io/four-letters Anyone wanna feel sad? give it a try! One commenter had this to say:

"Wow, that was powerful. I don't know what to say without spoiling it, so I'll just say that it is short enough that anyone wondering if they should play it, should absolutely play it. Very, very well done."

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

haha thanks! Brendan actually linked it to me in a discord letting me know i was in it... but not saying why, so it was still eye widening! great talk though, heres what i said on discord

me realizing my mention in the talk, while also a shoutout to a game i made, is a critique of my shoddy citations! and then a little philosophizing about citation and folk music and ip law etc

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

It's time to make a more up to date version of this with some more recent (and some unreleased / still in progress) games! Still open to new freelance stuff, especially if its light on code and heavy on art, level design, or narrative! (i can only hold so many codebases in my brain at once)

a picture of my game "Toward From" which is a grid based snake like screenshot and audioscape generator thing

A screenshot of my game Gaze, which is a gothic horror first person puzzle/narrative thing

a secret sneak peak of an unreleased thing! a hand reaches out toward some laundry in a strange geometric environment

A sneak peak at an unfinished fps game about cupids. Cupido peers out at the campus of his Alma Mater.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

I'm selling my game usb-cassettes here on Saturday! (And hopefully some other stuff?) Stop by and hang out, and maybe grab one o theeese babies!

my 3 available game cassettes! Plundercore Market, 3 Stories About The Future, and Trail Mix!

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

she believes in beauty shes venus as a bird

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

writing "I will not spend years on dialog juice" over and over on a chalkboard

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

would you shoot this guy with arrows or is he too cute?

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

some sort of first person shooter (cupid style) with tank controls and some special moves a la mario 64.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

grab a mug of sun-rot-bile and take a swig gamers i think this is my fav of The Horrors. bare witness to this and much more in my new game Blindspot.

a gamer with 3 health and 3 money takes a swig as he watches the dying sun sink into the river

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

this is me when im on my way to work at the Defeatedness Factory

bitsy room from my epic new game Blindspot

bitsy parking garage from my evil new game Blindspot

bitsy work parking lot from my horrible new game Blindspot

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

its been out only briefly but i'm already getting some much appreciated love in the comments. thank you! Come check out what the fuss is about!

"really wonderful relatable horrorshow. i was in a funk today but i think this 🔳 aspect ratio has rescued me <3"

"This is remarkable - the most simultaneously impressed and unsettled I've ever been with a Bitsy game. Really impressive balance between clarity and noise, especially with the Bitsy visual constraints."

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Blindspot will release tomorrow, i arbitrarily decide. I basically worked on this whenever i got stuck reading news that made me angry, so as a result it is a nasty ugly angry game. Fairly proud of the writing, art, and music in this. I hope you all get something out of it.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

new game is finished now, out soon.

Sweet Dreams He Says, But I Know He Means The Nightmare.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

demon's crest demon's crest demon's crest

screenshot of snes game demon's crest. gothic goblin ghouls etc

screenshot of snes game demon's crest. big ass meat dragon

screenshot of snes game demon's crest. icy mountain

screenshot of snes game demon's crest. ruined city

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

shocked and honored to still be on PMRank! A testament to the great TOs and events we've been having in Ontario lately that I can get on without having to risk my well being traveling to the states. but hey, some of y'all should come up here this year! I hear we have some really big events planned

im rank 37 out of the top 50 North American Project Plus Players! I play mario and my photo was from literalfraud and uh idk yay

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Brief moment of peace in an otherwise pretty upsetting bitsy

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

heres some actual screenshots of the games:

Screenshot of We Are Going To The Sea Today, one of the 3 Stories About The Future. A bustling town in the ruins of an old city.

Screenshot of And Other Stories. A CRT in the ocean displaying 3 scenes bleeding into eachother

Screenshot of my Cave. its very pink, and theres a frog guy.

screenshot of Gaze, one of the 3 Stories About The Future. a shadowy mansion in the distance.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

promotin the things u can pay me 4 on my itch: - And Other Stories Bonus Material! -3 Stories About The Future Bonus Material! -Fable of the Three Caves OST! the games are all free tho, enjoy either way! ergman.itch.io/and-other-st... ergman.itch.io/we-are-going... bearvegas.itch.io/cave

fable of 3 caves is a game by 3 peeps where we each made a cave. like a tiny chain game!

and other stories is 4 bitsies at the same time! bonus files have music, design docs, art files, etc.

3 Stories About The Future are 3 scifi/fantasy games about the future in 3 different game engines. bonus stuff comes with a post mortum pdf, ost, and more.

proceeds from this one go to gaza gofundmes

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

anyone feel like commissioning some art? album cover, christmas gift, game art? 30$ CAD an hour (peanuts), and im pretty Quick With It too! lemme know im rly likin drawing rn

pencil crayon and pen. a palatial estate entrance and parking lot, with various party goers

some ms paint art that kinda looks like a game but isnt. "those mountains look safe enough"

acrylic marker, wizard tower or somethin.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

I'm givin a lil talk at "ThinkyCon 2025" tommorow at 5 PM EST! about Trail Mix and Life in Captivity, and how there's no undo/rewind in either of them and how that effects the design and response to each game. Tune in! Doing it live so who knows what could happen! Very Nervous!

little thinkycon advert with my face and a nice scarf and the title of the talk "Is a Puzzle Game Without an Undo Still a Puzzle Game?"

Screenshot of Trail Mix, the level "Richard" to be precise. a colorful village full of our iconic pilsbury dough boy guys.

A screenshot of Life in Captivity. Green squares and brown walls and spongebob fish in the bg for some reason

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

a weird tennis club we stumbled on hidden behind some houses. was strangely the second tennis club we saw on the walk. how many tennis clubs are hiding just around the corner?

blue sky crossed by phone lines and tower, cupped by trees on either side, sunsetting pink and yellow below. before such sky, a blue fence and pink outbuilding, gray green grass and shrubbery

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Some more art. still making games but it takes too long and nothing i can post. this here is acrylic marker and pen.

a dude with a baseball cap drifting in a rowboat, thinking of the moon. surrounded by clouds, mountains, and water flowers

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

last china trip drawing, of my lovely wife who is the reason i went at all and the reason we did the cool art class that got me these markers chek her out on instagram for more cool art : @meet_your_puppy

claire with a headwrap, bangs, makin a peace sign, with a heart there

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

Some more acrylic marker stuff. Really fun to blend the colors when wet and also overlay when dry.

apartments in a cliff with waterfall and river. mysterious cave to the right

sunset over desert island and shipwreck. multicolored stars in the sky

rainbow meteor flying over pine forest. Christie Belcourt sky.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

"History a precession of skeletonized fish" not sure *exactly* what that means but it was the theme for these couple pieces. what do we think, anyone buying shirts with that on it acrylic marker, gel pen, watercolor, pencil crayon

a skeleton fish zooms thru a building globe in the bg, psychedelic colors, smiling x face shadows of building

"History A Precession of Skeletonized Fish"
a literal precession of said fish on the top page, with civilizations as their tails. below is a fish orbited globe, about to be eaten by a larger fish. smaller skelefish spirals are around as well.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

In Xian our teacher gave me some cool acrylic markers, This is a little fantasy building done with those markers on grid paper. Rly fun to play with. #art #markers #ScreenshotSaturday #idk

a mystical tower and outbuilding, treens and grass in the bg, pink clouds, yellow stars

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

A combination of train views and Xian skies. In Xian (and any other major city ofc) theres too much light pollution to see stars, but every night people fly kites with rainbow LEDs on them, creating their own constellations. I had a hard time capturing it in photos or paint but it was so cool

ocean, powerline, mountain, kites, sky. watercolor and pencil crayon

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Inside the old city walls of Xian. Theres a solid block of touristy bars and restaurants all lit up vibrantly. But right around the corner it's residential and there aren't even streetlights, just the dark wall on one side and silhouetted roofs n trees on the other. this one is direct from a photo.

watercolor and marker. silhouetted trees and houses frame the moon in the sky

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Some more imaginary china views, inspired loosely by shanghai and the views from our 10 hours of train ride landscape between shanghai, beijing, and xian watercolor, marker, pen, pencil crayon. I particularly like the mix of orthographic and perspective in the last, gonna explore that more sometime

gray green dome building in a park, yellow city in the distance

canal fishers, a small temple and apartment building along the shores, among other buildings and small creatures. the sky extends above full of stars and mysterious extensions of the forms below

orthographically rendered park in shanghai, with an isometric building with smiling roof, smoking denizen. more perspective in the background.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Something i was rly obsessed with in China was the little ecosystems that formed underneath air conditioner drips. Old temples seemed to recognize this drip-world by having beautifully carved natural iconography disguising rain runoff things. pen and watercolor, pen/cil and color pencil respectively

a cat sups on the ac drip oasis in a hutong. the ac is in a little cage, which are stylized differently depending on what neighbourhood you're in.

a carving of a flower drips water down to a real flower, surrounded by some vague elemental symbols. sun, water, hulu gourd (looks like a thumbs up but its not supposed to lol), fire, spade, and heart <3

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Some very quick sketches of longtangs in shanghai. we got to stay in a very cute room on a 3rd floor deep in a maze of alleys in the french concession. pen and pencil crayon

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

gonna try to regularly post some of the art I made on my china trip! an attempt to depict Hutong vibes, not based on a specific street or photo. a lot of what i was trying to do in the trip art was try to update my cartoon vocabulary to depict chinese architecture. watercolor and pencil crayon

a narrow alley in Beijing, in neon pencil crayon and washed out watercolor. A cat sleeps on the ground, a bike lies next to a drainspout. telephone wires cross the sky, an old temple towers in the distance, further back are newer apartment blocks

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

paradise-collab.itch.io/paradise-dig... new issue of paradise digest! with this issue, my 3 part series about "Cursors of Attention" in game design is complete! Feel free to read them all below, if you even can. the graphic design got a bit away from me hehe but damn if they dont look cool

page 1: The Hand. talking about the videogame as it exists in our bodies. full text here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G0DOqyi0-QWd1k5y0WP5HsIwfzLCTDzeWud3VS85tHI/edit?usp=sharing

part 2: The Mind: talking about the videogame as it exists in our minds, the processing of visual information, the forming of mental models, etc.

part 3. The World. The game as it exists in the Metagame. between players, seeping out into culture.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

cool article about hauntology and the legend of zelda. made me think new thoughts about my own game, pictured below:

"yknow in the original 3 hours i made corpse o ganon in I was mostly thinking about ganon as a metaphor for the recurrence of facism, and like idk mussulinis daughter. but today, with the context of the racism inherent in the ganon myth, it feels more like the myth facism tells us every 20 years or so, of some new bad man in the desert we suddenly uave a moral imperitive to obliterate and take the oil from. dominant ideologies and state enemies baked into even our most whimsicle media. western imperialism is haunted to violent paranoia by fear of vengeance from its subjects.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

also if anyone is in toronto and wants a physical cassette let me know maybe we can link up! each one is 15 CAD. money from 3 stories goes to gaza, money from the others goes ta me cause im still at a p big loss from buying these lol. ill probably hide some in lil libraries again tho.

trail mix, plundercore market, and 3 stories cassettes

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

sold three 3 stories cassettes at the toronto games week thing so here are the resulting donations. i actually end up paying more cause its in usd and euros. you too can take advantage of this by buying the game-pack online! comes with a big fat pdf and my best osts to date!

gaza gofundme receipt. american imperialism is a scourge on this damn earth

gaza gofundme. yesterday i saw my dad reposting blatant misinformation about iran on facebook, claiming 0 iranian civilians died.

gazan gofundme receipt. its insane to me that the rest of the west hasnt turned on israel and the us yet. hes literally said canada and greenland are next!!

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

it just kinda makes sense as a format for easily editible non linear dialogue. some of my more dialogue heavy games pull from google sheets. its useful for things like random variants of dialogue or having multiple languages. i tend to do earlier planning and free writing in phone notes tho.

extremely placeholder dialogue for a current unanounced project

3 languages of dialogue for No Sidewalks In The Mushroom Kingdom. the english was written in engine in a pretty unplanned way but i ported it over here to make translation easier.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

pluggin my girlfriends illustrations find her @meet_your_puppy on instagram

watercolor ink personal, won an award of some kind i think

poster for the best movie ever house 1977

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

i even made a helpful chart to decide which cassette to buy

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

last reminder! come to houndstooth tomorrow from 2 to 7 PM to buy cassette copies of my games, and also to see all these beautiful hand painted promo drawings in person! theyre just gonna be scattered all over the table p much. @torontogamesweek.com #gamedev #watercolors

basically fanart for my own game, trail mix! buy a cassette today!

cool 3 piece watercolor for the cassette cover of 3 Stories About The Future

Plundercore MArket! little references to my plundercore games and pop culture abound. try to find the 7 dragon balls

little promo drawing with my info. probably kinda hard to read but oh well. did you know i do commissions! u can commission a whole ass game for 30 bucks (if u want me to just make a game in 1 hour and give u the shitty result)

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Reminder! You can get a physical copy of all my plundercore games! good old fashioned bootlegs! walk a mario kart track on foot! Explore the flooded ruins of delfino! Escape from kirby world prison! Decompose the body of ganondorf! And more! June 15th @ houndstooth in @torontogamesweek.com yeah woo

Plundercore market cassette cover. Videogame knockoff characters in a big market. notably, yoshi puff a fat doobie

Future cat sailor title screen. "His family in desperate need of sustenance, Future Cat Sailor sets a course for the perilous flooded city, in search of its fabled treasure..."

No sidewalks in the mushroom kingdom title drop

screenshot of Hyperscale Blue, the "smallest game ever made, designed to be fully 100%able in the time it takes for a severed head to lose consciousness. Perfect for todays gamers on the go!"

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Reminder that you can get a physical cassette of my 3 Stories About The Future Collection, which comes with a Bitsy game, a Twine game, a Unity game, and a bunch of bonus stuff like OST and a 'making of' PDF. Best of all, the proceeds go to gaza!! Come to houndstooth July 15th!@torontogamesweek.com

Gaze, the unity game. eyeballs all over da damn place

Four Letters, the twine game. An image of a small tenement with a mom a boy and a bird.

We Are Going To The Sea Today, the bitsy game. various people stand around ready to wave you off on your journey.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

cassette 3: Trail Mix! but it actually also comes with puzzsofts colleidoscope and puzzsofts museum of time and space *and* an exclusive early alpha demo of trail mix.

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JohnLee Cooper @johnleeerg.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

cassette 2: Plundercore Market featuring all the plundercore games ive ever personally made, and some digital zine pages about what plundercore is.

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