iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

i love you, my tiny boxy dishwasher. thank you for saving my spoons (literally and figuratively)

A photo of a small, boxy dishwasher with a cute orange rim around a window looking into a pile of dishes being washed.

Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

the first game i worked on extensively, "An Outcry", is on sale at a low 50% off with the Steam autumn sale! it's got those autumn-night colors, takes place in october, and has some jack-o-lantern type birds! (don't worry about the birds.) store.steampowered.com/app/1817470/...

A flurry of silhouetted cars with red taillights, bumper on bumper, streaming down a busy road. On the left of the road is a tall building - a subway station - built by Otto Wagner. On the right, there is an apartment building, and a tiny person in purple. There is text at the top, which reads: "The Vienna city belt."

A rotten, soot-covered political poster for a political party called "AFP", in front of the Austrian flag. The candidate's face is scratched and burnt away. Text at the top reads, decoding the poster: "'We will not be silence!' (Our crimes should go unpunished.)

A man-sized, raven-like being with a black mask and glowing, burning insides, opening its beak and jovially holding up a beer-bottle while smoking a cigarette. A textbox at the bottom of the screen, spoken by this being, reads: "settle down among your kin, have a drink, kid, settle in!"

The courtyard of a Vienna apartment building, covered in grey birds with glowing orange eyes. Most of the screen is bathed in darkness; only a spotlight shines on the person who emerged out into it, a bald person with a bandage around their head and a black censor bar over their eyes. Text at the bottom of the screen reads: "Your curtain may be calling. Breathe, unnamed. Know what you have to do."

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

trying to draw way more frequently again. woe! it is upon you! Jacques the Fatalist from Blanksword.

A marble statue-esque being, chubby, with the pincers of an earwig on his head sits on a black branch and looks down at an abyss.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

how are we feeling fellow layton fans im not feeling so great

the image of Professor Layton near-dead on the ground, edited to say: "My injuries were so Level-5, I was genAI for a month. I was lucky to be DEAD"

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"games were a promise", a text document on my computer, written tonight. with apologies to efrim menuck, and hopes i didn't rope "my contemporaries" in wrongly.

videogames were a promise.

they were a cultural medium that said, in a hoarse and bitcrushed voice first, then rising in definition, in clarity, with each generation:

"we can tell stories that truly involve you."

you slot this cartridge or this disk in, lock it and load it, and here you are:
adversary to my ones and zeroes.
here you are, an abstracted you on the screen that moves when your thumb will it.
here you are, surrounded by a facsimile of the real or imagined.
here you are, the piece on the board.
here you are, the driving force of meaning.

you, the player.

but games are breaking their promise.

games no longer need a player.

like the stock market, like cryptocurrency, like gambling apps that bet on sports or elections or plagues. they are now a sign without a referrent; they are a plus sign or a minus sign. always online, they are disconnecting from the humane and the human; they sever themselves violently from the human beings that create them, in great bundles of thousands at a time, tens of thousands last year, and that number is finished rising, rising, going up like the line it feeds to its meatgrinder.
their physical manifestations flag and crumble; they sever themselves from the players, too, like a disputed belonging in a divorce. "you will own nothing and be happy"; in owning nothing, you will be an owned object. ownership of things is wealth; ownership of people is dominion, is domination.

stream the newest live service, always online. listen to the latest heinous voice piece of more or less artificial intelligence blather every few seconds, filling the silence, painting over reflection to prevent introspection, or contemplation, or any thought. do nothing, and watch the cutscene as a you-less "you" shatters the skulls of human beings, lovelessly rendered by artists whose trauma was irreplaceable by generative A.I. (the hurt of an intelligence must be real for the later lay-offs to doubly sting).

games are turning into a torture device for anyone willing to hear them out.

the people making games are livestock to be cut.
the people buying games are numbers going up.
the people playing games are rats in boxes.
the people loving games hate games and themselves for hating games.

it's like the promise was written on sand, washed away in the deluge.

and people like me want to be a rock. people like my contemporaries, who heard the siren song of the promise lead them to shore, want to sing upon it to break more people's hearts.

i've spoken to people who only play antediluvian games, now. who play ur, or chess; who play the NES, the SNES, the PSX, something, anything other than the rot-driven, digital asbestos-riddled, untouched by human hands and untouching of human hearts aphasia that is modern video games.
that turn away from the cost of doing business to give business to only the old, or the small.

but people like me are starving on the rocks. there is no boat coming to us, bringing us sustenance. we are dying.

we want to be the change of the tide; but this system doesn't give change to those like us, who sing.
it only takes.

please let our games be good.
please let our games be ours.
please let our games be played.
please let our games be real.
please let our games be loved.

this is a pamphlet towards a radical humanity in game development and fandom.

games are made by humans for humans to play; they are not made of humans for humans to consume.

games are made of code, they are not made of claude.

games are made of art, they are not generated.

games are a promise.

say it again, with meaning, this time.

- Quinn K.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

A Dad joins the fray. Horizon. Dad. do not separate them. #Blanksword

Too statuesque characters standing there, thinking; pondering. one, named Horizon, has large eyes and horns in the style of a bobcut, the other, named Dad, is bespectacled with two glowing, firefly-like horns. Horizon wears a white, short-sleeved dress shirt with a dark-blue tie, dark-blue pants; Dad wears heavy garden boots and one garden glove, alongside an orange, dad-like turtleneck sweater.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

clip studio paint finally works on my device again! time to slowly rebuild my art skills...!! have a Horizon from Blanksword.

a statuesque, marble-skinned girl with large eyes, wearing a simple outfit with black pants, a white dress-shirt, and a black tie, puts her finger to her invisible mouth, and looks to the upper right, pondering.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

can't be sharing the majority of that one (it's rather personal), but here's one that i felt turned out well. (alt-text has the transcript)

22.7.2026

at the end of a lifetime, all questions lose their answers.

in a dead head, the electrical impulses keeping the central nervous system – our storage medium, unreadable – alive and thinking peeter out, stray without direction or purpose to places beyond their wiring. i always wondered what happened to that latent current, where it, at last, would flow; i suppose the only logical answer is the same for all electricity and all people: into the ground.
questions don't need answers; a call can do without a response. but there's a loneliness in that, in a lack of answers; transcendetal loneliness (or "homelessness", as some call the concept), sure, but also a personal one.
my great uncle pinned a quote above the entrance to his house, now no longer his, that said: "between the powerful and the weak it is freedom that suppresses, and the law that liberates". i asked my great-aunt about it, and we had a brief discussion on its meaning, but arrived at the conclusion that we should've asked my great-uncle what it meant to him while we still had the chance.

the questions you had for people remain without answers; they're too dead to tell you, now.
and all the questions you hold in your hand, and all the answers you're keeper of; all of them fizzle out in the ground beneath your body, from the moment you hit "off" till you're decomposed and the fatty wiring that once conducted you is a mere past-meal to a worm's child of a worm's child.
we wonder what sort of directions the unfinished works of musil, of tolstoj, of kafka would have been like, had they continued; but external evidence of their existence is all we have to go on.
if i only write down the ideas i'm truly confident in, how many narrative threads burn to ash in my cremation?
how many books burn when a writer turns to ash in an urn?
"to make art at the speed of thought" is, for those without scrupel nor standards, the appeal of large language models.
but a "make idea" button is so unbelievably tedious in concept, and unenticing in practice. every part of it is malformed.
some of my ideas will always be mine, and will never be shared with anyone but the dirt that i fall to, dead, and the worms that eat whatever will be left of me. they'll like the taste, i'm sure; true connoisseurs.
these ideas may be special, or they may be ordinary; but in their lostness, they opedn the possibility space they contained back up to another creative, young or old, somewhere. maybe their life is similar to mine, or completely different; but either way, an idea, once truly externalized, is just as good on paper as in the heads of any dead authors.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

my favorite contemporary band, mary in the junkyard, released a new album today; "role model hermit" www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBq8... gonna livepost each track

a black and white photo of a bearded person in a raincap, old cardigan, and coat with a bag slung around their one shoulder and a white mouse on their other shoulder.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Angel of Ties' regularly scheduled Fun Reminder for your Computer Device

The Angel of Ties from Blanksword, a snake-like, white statues of a man with orange snake-like eyes, wearing an bright orange sack coat and a blue tie with various office supplies embroidered on it, typing on a 80s-90s era computer.
There is text around him, saying: "Have Fun on the Computer! Don't EVER Troll! !" In the lower right corner, there is a small piece of writing saying "What in His name is "Traitorposting""

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

today, i'm looking back at the path behind me. mostly i was a side-character in bigger stories than my own, but i can't help but feel a profound sense of gratitude all the same. not many people who've only been here for 31 years have left ripples like this.

A copy of the 2025 OFF remake by Mortis Ghost and Fangamer, on a shelf in Quinn K.'s apartment, next to several games Nintendo DS games.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

the history of this one is funny: i basically had to stop using proper capitalization in my writing in order to be able to get back into the groove of writing poetry. the chutes were blocked otherwise. hope you have a pleasant read! :)

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

for the first time in years, i've put out a new poetry zine! it's got 10 new poems in it - some of my more visceral work lately quinnk.itch.io/lower-case grab it for 2 dollars here! <3

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

"be a 2D dev" they said. "it'll be easier" they said

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

favorite thing the Blanksword fan server has started doing lately: Traitorposting

A string of four images, with a fifth cut off at the bottom. several names, some of whom are Blanksword team members, post stickers of the game's demo's superboss, the Pet Traitorpod. It looks like a salmon crossed with a tiktaalik.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

joke-thread over, Grandma is here and i love her and would kill anybody who would ridicule her or bring her to harm

an INCREDIBLY cute old lady from fire emblem on the NES

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Bobby from King of the Hill (with a pompadour)

A pixelated soldier from Fire Emblem on NES whose countenance resembles bobby from King of the Hill. His armor is big and blue.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

was anyone going to tell me that fire emblem on NES has absolute classics of face in it or did i really have to find this out on my own first

An incredibly mischievous looking, buff villager, smugly looking to the upper left.

An armor merchant with an incredibly chiselled neck, slicked-back hair, and a smug expression.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

new year, new me, new she/he!

A screencapture of a set of pronouns: "she/he".

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

i think psalmanazar and herodotus had nothing to do with it. the batter just did that

A screenshot of a battle scene from the OFF Remake. The Batter is alive; all 3 add-ons have been killed.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

on the other hand, this has been me since the game started. i have no idea how to read this one's protagonist yet. looking forward to where this continues to go (with apologies to splendidland, who i nabbed this panel from)

a panel from splendidland's "mario says fuck" comic. two hands hold a notebook that says "is Tets a good boy?" with two tick-boxes - one for yes, the other for no - underneath

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcSF...

a bearded and long-haired figure in a black coat in a dark night, surrounded by snow, in the shadow of a dark, towering building. looking more closely at the snow, each flake is actually a tiny human person. text around the image says "this city makes canyons / all littered with snow" "and beneath their crummy towers / our tiny bodies blow and blow". in the middle of the image, there is a patch of a soaring black bird on a white backdrop of paint.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

it's itch io creator day today, huh? quinnk.itch.io Well! if you haven't obtained any of the games on my itch yet, and want to ensure i get a good cut of the proceeds of them - do make a purchase today! :>

A busy road in Vienna, Austria, next to a large building housing a subway station. A purple person stands on the right of it. Text at the top says: "The Vienna city belt."

A quaint, wallpapered house with a TV and a kitchen. Two husbands, Anatoli and Pyotr, are standing there. The TV is playing a weather report. The weatherman says: "HOT HOT HOT! It's going to burn like boiling acid in the mouth of a screaming demon, that's how hot it is!"

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

i've recently learned that it used to be called "rap genius", and was gradually gentrified by users submitting non-rap lyrics until the site was renamed, which is upsetting in its own way, but hey, at least the site gives us deep wisdom! like this (song being described is "still" by black midi):

The "About" part of a genius dot com lyrical analysis page. Underneath "Genius Annotation", it reads: "Yeah bro I honestly have no clue what this one is about". It has 5 downvotes.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

most of the Blanksword team is taking a break until 2026 begins, in order to recuperate from the stress of the Kickstarter hustle. i'm also trying to take it easier - mostly not working and doing for-fun art like guitar covers - but i did shake out this map earlier: "Slightly Damaged Living Space"

BLANK, Blanksword's protagonist, standing in the middle of an apartment titled "Lightly Damaged Living Space". Most of its wooden floorboards have given way to a bottomless abyss.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

when it gets to be Halloween Seasons, i should start making a habit of dawsonposting i've been doing it a strangely high amount this year and i'm having a blast

Mike Dawson, protagonist of Darkseed II, running like a jackass on a morning jog

Mike Dawson, protagonist of Darkseed II, acting surprised at whatever is chasing him

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

catch my mind open like mike dawson's

Mike Dawson, protagonist of Darkseed, getting his mind opened in an extremely yonic way to have an alien fetus implanted in his head by an HR Giger-designed contraption.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

as for "when" - BLANK's very first drawing ever, in 2022, had the brain outline already:

Blank, a little white guy in a white dress-shirt, with a visible brain-outline on his head, wielding a twisted sword

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

in 2015, i had a game idea called "radon: a vapor play". that game's protag was a gaudy gold picture frame whose painting was missing, and had to be collected in parts across several surreal worlds. the visible brain-outline was a continuation of that same idea, of a void as part of a design.

a vaguely person-shaped golden picture frame with a black void where normally a painting would be.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

something wicked (sweet) this way comes... (new icon by @koboldfactory.bsky.social !)

a drawing of a woman with white skin, big, round glasses, brown eyes and short brown hair wrapped in a polka-dotted scarf, looking directly and confidently at the viewer.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

hmmm.. hmm, yes. let's do this, too, why not!

Tell me a video game name and I'm going to tell you my honest opinion about

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

i did this a couple of days ago, but finally mustered the courage to post it.

"Undertale made me want for games that hold the player accountable more; held people accountable more. In that way, it was one of many games pushing me to start gamedev myself."

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

An Outcry is 50% off in the Steam Summer Sale! store.steampowered.com/app/1817470/... you should give it a look if you haven't yet. >:)

The unnamed, a bald, scrawny person with a censor bar over their eyes, is smoking a cigarette and having coffee outside. they're sweating, unwell from the heat. there's text next to them thzat states: "90° at 10 AM on a summer morning"

A screenshot of the game "An Outcry"'s steam page. It is 50% off.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

it begins. i'm committing the cardinal tech-writing sin of writing the intro before the first actual installment of the tutorial-- but i've got notes, i've got a plan, and maybe, if things go well, in 8-10 months, i'll slap you all with a tutorial on how to make turn-based combat in Game Maker!

RPG Maker 2003, and to a much lesser degree its successor MV (which I also dabbled in), are tools that leave a noticeable inprint on the final result of your hard work. Some people go so far as to call them "mod-platforms", but I disagree with that point-of-view; they *are* an engine, just not exactly a graceful one.
In exchange for a faster and easier development process (which you, of course, might find desireable!), they are unmistakeable in their presence surrounding the games you make in them. Many people can spot an RPG Maker within seconds of playing it - especially those with an intent to derogatize your efforts.

Game Maker has many advantages! It's versatile, offers support for many platforms, a great myriad tools, literal decades of user- and developer-created resources... But above all, it's an engine that leaves its visible stamp on your work much less noticeably. For developing 2D games, few tools are better for a bloody beginner of programming.

Its downside is, of course, code. GML is, in the grand scheme of things, both a very forgiving programming language to learn, *and* a very strange language, whose function-names are highly unintuitive to a lot of more storied programmers, and whose syntax is oftentimes too forgiving of mistakes that would get you eaten in C#, C++, or even its basis Javascript.

So, great! Game Maker is smooth sailing for our kind then! Right?

Wrong. I spent 2 years needing to learn it before I could do anything resembling an actual turn-based RPG. The biggest hurdle in that ordeal was the core of the concept itself:

Turn-based combat.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

i think the most damning thing i've realized today is that this painting of a house that adolf hitler painted ~a century ago (which i have nicknamed "Hitler-Haus") is about on par with a good 95% of all AI pictures out there. it truly is the world's shittiest picture puzzle every time.

A painting of courtyard of a house with myriad perspective and sizing errors, sloppily masked with blotchy foliage.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

worth their weight in Mold 😎

a screenshot of a map-editor in Game Maker, showing an enormous stain of black mold in a run-down apartment building, with a bright orange collision mask on top of it.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

- Scrap Book II: Stars and Psychosis. this one was just a vent game i knew better than to make. still looking for a proper continuation of Scrap Book...

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

- Railroad Playhouse. an edutainment and train-manager-inspired game that @emceeprophit.bsky.social was supposed to voice the tutorial character in. abandoned because making a level-editor is rough, + its message lost its strength after i got disillusioned with an author i alluded to in its writing.

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Quinn K. @quinnkdev.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

- Avicide sequel to "An Outcry". took place in a mountain town in Carinthia, Austria. a little bit "Chulip", a little bit "Papers, Please", a little bit "An Outcry". shelved because 2 projects of this magnitude simultaneously would've killed me, and i couldn't find strong enough characters for it.

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