Over the holiday break of 2021, I had the pleasure of being included in the list of people cool enough to get a shot at playing AN OUTCRY. 
An outcry bills itself as “A branching-path narrative horror RPG set in Vienna, Austria. Guide the Unnamed through the worst night of their life: Harass your neighbours. Debate with birds. Smoke to survive.” I myself describe it as something like a classic roleplaying game set in the middle of an existential crisis, a fight for existence and survival.

I got a second good opportunity a few weeks ago, to sit down with the lead developer of the game, Quinn K. Here’s the interview that came out of that:

DH: Who are you Quinn? How long have you been in game development? What’s your history with Videogames?

Q: My name is Quinn K. They/She pronouns nowadays. I’m a game developer, writer and translator. I’ve been in games since 2011 or so. 2008 if you’re being generous with some of the like old timey first few attempts with fangame stuff. Ahead of anything now, I’m a writer. I dabble a little bit in music and mostly work in a shit-ass program called RPGmaker2003.
It’s a user experience nightmare, but more on that later. Now I’m in the process of learning Unity for playmaker and I’m looking forward to what I’ll be producing.

DH: You said if we’re being generous you have history going back to 2008, so let’s be generous. How far does it really go back?

Q: Probably 2005, honestly. That was about when my art skills began to crystalize into something I really wanted to do. By that point I had already begun playing videogames, even like in grade school. I played stuff like Pokemon Blue on my dad’s Gameboy and such.
In middleschool, y’know, the gameboy advance would be a thing and that was basically when most formative games became part of my life. Stuff like the old Super Mario Brothers, Mario RPG specifically…Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga. They all sound extremely similar!

DH: What a good series of RPG’s to start with!

Q: I suppose it is yeah. They’re extremely interesting little games, very colorful and child friendly yet not without any edges.

DH: I definitely remember of them being maddeningly difficult, especially for kids with no RPG experience.

Q: The final form of Cackletta at the end of Superstar Saga was a really tough boss.
When I started playing those games, and simultaneously had begun to really feel like art was something I really enjoyed doing I began to combine the two.
I started making these like little maps and outline ideas for hypothetical Super Mario Brothers games, like hey Nintendo hire me I’ve been doing this shit since 2005.

DH: There’s definitely a lot of gamedevs I think who have stories of starting in notebooks in school.

Q: Yeah I believe it. It’s a nice thing – sort of externalizes this adventure in our heads that we really have in order to continue passed the point when the game is over. Really…when you have some sort of artistic inclination to express yourself through videogames…even if it’s just using themes you’ve seen in videogames. It’s really like – I’ve played this, for whatever reason I can’t play more of this, I’m continuing in my head. I’ve lingered on this but that’s the very beginning.
In 2008 I’d turn 13 years old or so, and that would be the time I would step across the threshold because that was most forums entry age. You couldn’t join unless you were 13 years old or older at that time.
So when I turned 13 I had heard about the Earthbound and Mother series from Super Smash Brothers and I was curious so I entered the starmen.net community.

DH: god we probably know some of the same people.

Q: It’s a strange little pool of internet celebrities and like just people you know but don’t know I guess? Members of starmen.net are kind of everywhere. It’s like a little diaspora.

DH: Almost everyone doing professional pixelart now…they’re either from Spriters-Resource, Mario Fan Games Galaxy or Starmen.net

Q: Yeah oh god, you’re absolutely correct. Does The Spriters-Resource still exist?

DH: Yes and I refuse to discuss this further or I will dox myself.

Q: Yeah, so I joined starmen.net I start doing pixelart – first they were just edits of sprites from the main games. I specifically remember I edited a characters battle sprite from Mother 3 to be Fassad without the horns.

DH: Do you still have the edits?

Q: I do yes.

DH: So that’s kind of the history of how you got started in videogames, do you remember if there was a specific game besides Mario & Luigi that made you want to learn the toolset and start working on things of your own?

Q: Yes, there’s a very very specific game like that yes. It’s OFF by Mortisghost. It was in fact the thing that got me started in anything videogame development adjacent.

DH: And how did you get involved in OFF?

Q: I had a girlfriend back in those days for all of four years. It was a long distance relationship and not a very good one – for multiple reasons that are not necessary to discuss. I mean we were kids, we were fifteen or sixteen or whatever the fuck. That girlfriend was y’know from a French speaking country and by complete chance her and I were fans of RPGmaker games. So she decided to show me OFF.
My father comes from France, therefore I have some French skills that I was able to apply just to reading the French text. I’m not very good at speaking French but I am however good at reading it and deciphering it.
I played OFF and it was um…it stirred something in me. It’s a game that I believe..I think to this day that even though a lot of aspects of it have not aged as gracefully as they appeared back in those days,
They just don’t hold up as well, despite that I still do believe there’s nothing really like OFF out there.
I remember very clearly the moment when I finished OFF. It was late at night, my parents had already went to bed. I shut off the computer and my room was so dark. I went up into my bunk beds and tucked myself in and when I closed my eyes I just saw these like sheet ghosts floating in this profound harrowing nothingness.
It was one of my first run-ins with an existentialist void.

DH: We did OFF last year for the Deep-Hell Book Club, I hadn’t played it before and I still remember the sounds that play as you go into those conversations about the elements in the world. It’s definitely a game that if you play it at any time in life and it’s the right time, it’ll stick with you for a long time.

Did you have a feeling after you finished some of the work with OFF that this was something you had to do?

Q: Yes I did but it lay dormant for a long long time. For the context of those reading the interview right now, I was the English translator for OFF. After I’d played OFF and had it have that effect on me I didn’t feel like I wanted that effect to only stay with me. I wanted to share with people from as many countries as possible by translating it into English. I mean I was a 15-16 year old kid, I forget exactly what age I was at that time…and my English was not good, and my French was not perfect either. The result of that is that first translation is really terrible, but it did the trick.

DH: It got the work out there. I believe that later you’d come and re-translate it, right?

Q: Yes. I re-translated it twice. Once in 2012 with the help of an old internet acquaintance. I’m not sure what name they go by anymore, so I don’t think it’s worth it to mention the name.
Finally another time in 2018 I wrapped another jab at it. Which is a little more controversial than the second version of that translation, funnily enough even though it is also a far more accurate translation than any of the previous once.

DH: That makes me want to ask – is there anything about OFF that you learned during the second translation that changed how you looked at it the third time?
Q: Yes. Absolutely. There are plenty of things that I learned either that second translation or in between the second and third. One of them was for one just a couple of my mistranslations – I had mistranslated the end of the Queen’s first monologue as “I will not let you lay a hand on the child who we have brought into the word.” when the possessive pronoun was actually different in French so it was “I will not let you lay a hand on the child who has brought us into the world.”

DH: That seems like a small change, but it kind of impacts the text a lot.

Q: It does. It does indeed – this mistranslation has brought its reverberations into today with people still making fanart of the Queen and the Batter as husband and wife and such. Which was not a mistranslation incidentally. Specifically later on in the ending bits of OFF, the Judge says  “Is the obscuring mist of the narrative really your excuse for killing woman and child?” and I mistranslated it as wife and child.

DH: Is that what made you say the third one was controversial – that it changed people’s expectations of the text?

Q: Yes. Indeed. First of all that, second of all it’s also just…the fact that I will admit that due to my aiming of accuracy and legibility which I did less so in the second version. Accessibility to put it shortly. I feel like a lot of people also felt like a lot of the poetry was lost, which is understandable.

There are reason to prefer the second version of the translation, but I do feel like the third is the better translation overall.

DH: So launching off from…OFF, was there something you went on to work on next? Did it take you a few years to sharpen your skills, what did life really look like after that?

Q: After 2018 what did life look like…well in 2016 I had entered a relationship that did not go particularly well. Without going into more detail…I feel it shaped the way that my future would look and my self-perceived ability to shape my own future would be like. I for a long time between 2018 and now I spent a lot of time feeling worthless and unable to do much of anything. Not for lack of trying, I would often try but I never felt like anything would have panned or crystalize into anything concrete.

I had the first idea for An Outcry back in 2017 when I was already working on the third version of the translation. On the side I made this Twine adventure called Ah. It’s still on Itch.io somewhere under my old username which was recdra.

After Ah was wrapped up, I instantly went on to make a second one which I called An Outcry. An Outcry would be the very basic blueprint for what the game is now, the game of that same name.

An Outcry started out as this tiny sketch of a text adventure, a Twine adventure specifically which never went anywhere. Around that time Twine would change from version 1.4 to version 2.0, thereby throwing all of it’s syntax out of the window and I was instantly unable to use it.

DH: I feel like that’s around the time you also stop seeing lots of Twine games getting submitted to gamejams and stuff like that.

Q: It was just a huge sudden wave of exclusion. It was really terrible, really really terrible. It made the engine more powerful I don’t doubt that…I mean if someone told me it also didn’t do jack shit I would believe it (laughter).

DH: It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone saying they dropped a Twine project around that time, from developers who now have changed to Ren’py or small RPGmaker games.

Q: Which is exactly what I’m doing.

DH: Was there a point where you took that first version and started to turn it into the now released version of the game?

Q: That was in mid 2020, I had previously also done a quick attempt – see Nate Kiernan’s Kritiqal Care episode with Kyra and myself for that. I had tried to make it into a point and click adventure for a brief while but that never panned out, for a myriad of reasons. In mid 2020 the pandemic had been here for three months, or a little more. I had decided since the pandemic had completely put out my ability to seek out work – being an Asthmatic – on ice, that I would just start a project. Start properly like developing a videogame. I had the idea for An Outcry in my head since 2017, It got really solid in 2019 then at the beginning of 2020 I abandoned the point and click version. In mid 2020 I’d start the RPGmaker2003 version, which is the one that has just released.

DH: Was the creative process an “A-ha” moment this is the story I want to tell, or was it something that built slowly over time as you kept revisiting the idea?

Q: I have often been called a “person that wants to be heard”. I remember one specific moment when my partner told me that I very much seem like the person who wants to be, but hasn’t been heard. Not in the sense of oh my head is so big I’m so intelligent – more in the sense that my head is so full of things that have to get out or I will go crazy. In that way, I had to write and create An Outcry with the help of everyone else who was involved.

DH: That feelings of having to get something out – do you remember if there was one specific scene that you sat down and said “I have to do this first?”

Q: Yes there was. It’s specifically the now sort of (among the very few people that have played this game) infamous Man-Shrike scene. Beforehand there was also a Route A finale, but that was scrapped and repurposed for a short visual novel that I did together with Jack King-Spooner.

But, that was the very first thing I needed to get out. The second thing was in October 2020 I made the Man-Shrike scene, and it has only very minutely changed since the first writing of it.

DH: Do you remember what made you want to sit down and do that first?

Q: It was the line “You do not exist, hence you must die.”

DH: Why that line? Where did you draw it from? Was it a distillation of things you’ve felt?

Q: It was distillation of things I had been feeling, distillation of the myriad of stresses put upon not just myself, but anyone I knew had seen around who’s at the margins of society. Just having to withstand the absolute bullshit of people like Jordan Peterson, of people like Ben Shapiro. Alex Jones and such. I felt like at some point this phrase came to me, “You do not exist hence you must die.” Which was like a distillation, a concentration of their entire Anti-trans narrative. Like the person in front of me cannot exist, so they must die.

DH: Players in An Outcry begin without an idea of who they are or how they identify – I think there are things in the game beyond just that line.

Q: Yeah the entire thing with anonymity in An Outcry – Anonymity is an extremely important thing. Both a property of the main character and the main villains, the Shrikes. It’s expressed in the censor bar that they’re wearing that is also analogous to the players control. In their anonymity lies a ubiquitous of experience – in the song that Hope (one of the two main composers) and I composed together called Chameleon ends with the words “they are none, a concept of self, they are Chameleon” which is sort of an expression of this sort of anonymity as part of the unnamed.

The Shrikes, who are of course the main villains, their anonymity is through an exaggeration of their natural form. If you look at the logohead (put a picture in here) they have a weird white stripe across their face that leads right into their beak. I had stylized it to be a black mask.

DH: A Domino mask.

Q: Exactly.

DH: That ties back into the censor bar imagery. Now, I’ve only done one route through the story so far but there’s that scene where you sit down with some characters and the censor bar jumps from the player to this other character – I wasn’t expecting that.

Q: The censor bar, like I said, is a symbol of shared experience. The Unnamed isn’t the only one who suffers at the margins of society. So does Anne, so does Mrs. Yildirim. Just because the story chooses to put you in the shoes of The Unnamed, doesn’t mean no one else is suffering. That other people aren’t also important.

DH: You have this huge cast of all of these people dealing with their own problems. On the margins of society not just for gender, but also age and economic circumstances.
Was there a fluid cast while you worked on An Outcry or was it mostly set in stone?
Q: The cast was pretty set in stone by 2019. A lot of things did change during the course of development – for a little while I’d never wanted to have Mrs. Yildirim’s children in the story.

Just because the experience of writing children is not one I’m too keen on, but I feel like I did a good enough job in the end. I felt like the story would be unnecessarily abstract and heartless to just make Mrs. Yildirim a door to two children that never show up in the game. That’s why that ended up being in there, but otherwise most other things were design decisions.
Another thing with Mrs. Yildirim we realized that we would not be able to portray a Turkish-Muslim immigrant to Austria without the help of someone who’s actually Turkish-Muslim. So we put out a job listing on our twitter, which funnily enough is the thing that lead me to the Haunted PS1 Community, because the sensitivity reader we found, Kaya, who makes some really cool games under the moniker “OkSoft” if you wanna look that up – they were a big sweetheart and very helpful during the sensitivity reading process. They brought me into that community, which I still take part in today.

DH: After An Outcry, then, looking forward to that – is that something you’d want to do in the future, that haunted ps1 aesthetic?

Q: I wouldn’t want to pin myself down like that. For one, I feel like that aesthetic is not my nostalgia, it’s not the sort of thing I could speak to earnestly. And If there’s one thing I value above anything else especially my own expression of self, is earnestness. I don’t feel like I could make an earnest feeling Haunted PS1 game. Like Capitol P S 1

DH: I did kind of want to talk about the release of An Outcry a little bit. Was there a point in development you knew it was going to be done by, or was it more like working on it until all of the ideas gelled together?

Q: We had a release date in mind basically as early as November. In the grand scheme of things, is a relatively early to set ones release date like two months in advance. I was just…I was prepared to basically say that around the middle of December we would be done. I would wrap this up, even if I or anyone else had more ideas we wouldn’t put them in. Just by simple virtue that our rag tag team of weirdos…some of them were overworked, others had already done their job and were just lending moral support. I was just exhausted too, the development cycle had only been a year and a half but had been massively taxing on my mental and physical health. Hand-in-hand of course with quarantine, with self isolation and all of that.
As well as my finances. An Outcry despite being such a self contained story and made in such a small engine, such a small and limited engine, was very taxing on my personal resources as well. Specifically the worldly resources of money and such.
By that point I had decided that when mid December or earlier rolls around and we’ve squashed all of the bugs, even if we have more ideas they would not be in this game. That’s how it would be.

DH: Having released An Outcry and you’ve gone through with that decision – do you think it accomplished all of its goals, or would you return to that imagery? There’s that moment with a big project where you have the satisfaction of going “that’s it” and turning it lose.

Q: Satisfaction is one way to put it. An Uncomfortable Finality is another way to put it, it is that sense that “this isn’t mine anymore” it’s complete. I can’t add anything more to it, the way it is out there right now is the way that people will remember it, those that do see it.
That’s not entirely a melancholy feeling, but it does have that melancholy tinge to it.
There are things that I wish I had done differently with An Outcry. There are things I wish I had done better, decidedly – it was a first time designers project. There are things that I was very, very happy that people felt worked even though I personally felt weren’t working quite as well as I would have liked (laughs).

DH: It’s there anything specific that leaps out?

Q: This is my big secret, uh, you know the battle option Step Back? It does fuck all.

DH: It doesn’t uh, reduce damage or anything like that?

Q: It does nothing. I was simply unable to remove it from the interface completely and reliably, so I kept it around as a turn waster for the player. Because I knew the player could only waste a single turn with it, because they can’t do it more than once.

DH: That is a pretty funny thing to keep around after development. It reminds me of…what, Final Fantasy VII has a Magic Defense stat that just doesn’t work I think?

Q: Or the vestigial elements of all of the first Pokemon games.
I talked at one point recently with my friend Amon – Amon26

DH: I’m just throwing it out there I am a giant fan.

Q: They’ve been in game development now for probably a decade now. Longer than myself – I asked him at one point simply like “god is this how it always is with videogames, that they’re just barely squeezed out the door, and no one feels like they’re done with them yet but they gotta be out there?” and Amon26’s is just like “yep, that’s what it’s like with every single one of my games.” At some point you just feel like: Well I can’t put more into this. I’m too exhausted, or I don’t have enough money, or all of those things.

DH: At some point you say “this is it!”

Q: And cut the old girl loose, yep. (laughs)

DH: Do you feel like now after An Outcry has released, that now you’re wanting to jump into another development project, work in some other artistic venues?

Q: All of the above.

DH: That’s a lot.

Q: (laughs) for what I mean specifically, all of the above but not at the same time. I was resting for the remainder of January as best I could, with all of the post release things waiting around. But…I also pursued some other avenues of creativity, like I took out the old axe again. I’m not a particularly good guitarist but I enjoy myself when I play guitar.

DH: I can definitely see you spinning that off into a Guitaroo Man Visual Novel. You’ve jumped off An Outcry and I want to go back to what Amon26 said – do you feel like you’re done with it?

Q: I hmm and haw about that. At this moment I say no, I will not return to An Outcry. I’ve said this earlier and I ended up returning to it to fix a single egregious issue with the game. People had to sit through a three to five minute cut scene every time they lost to the final boss. I already returned to An Outcry briefly for 30 minutes of development time I just made a new version and uploaded it to both platforms.
There are a things I’d want to fix. I wouldn’t fuckin’ George Lucas my own shit, I’m not a person like that and I stand by the things I’ve said in An Outcry. It’d be more like technical issues, and small honest little bugs.
Like the fact that after Schmidt comes down from the elevator at one point in the story, and you go outside and exit that map and re-enter. Then you see that the elevator is on the rails twice, ones below and ones above just hanging in midair.

DH: I didn’t even notice.

Q: No One notices. I’m the only pure person who notices and I pull air through my teeth every single time.

DH: Have you thought about just going back and adding more elevators until people do notice?

Q: There is a bit in An Outcry where I do add more elevators and hope people notice! That’s the abstract scene before you meet Esma.

DH: I know the scene but now I’m like “fuck, did I notice?” I definitely didn’t notice.

Q: I don’t think you noticed (laughs.) It’s….An Outcry has some things going on that I wish people thought about a bit more but no one has yet.

DH: It’ll take time – otherwise is there anything specific since release that you wish people saw? Do you not feel comfortable making that artistic statement? Or that you’re just fine with it.

Q: There are brief moments where I have some doubts or some like, some sense that y’know An Outcry is over now and I already wouldn’t say things the way I said them. Those feelings waver and I can’t really put complete stake in them as a result.
I’m mostly fine without people have received it honestly. One thing I wish people would see more is…should I just say it? I want to help people along, but I also don’t want to just regurgitate it for them.
I wish people thought a bit more about what the game means, and what everything that the player sees it any point when it is connected to the word “Diorama” at one point during the story.
The words “diorama” and “theatre”. The second one is just a small thing of just…notice this and appreciate me! I’m a person who…in my writing ever since the “OFF!” translation actually, has been very adamant about utilizing the same words consistently, in a consistent context throughout all of a single text. In An Outcry a word I use consistently is “killed.” The word “killed” in that context of An Outcry carries a specific connotation. That’s something that I think maybe people will never guess for themselves.

DH: Is there a point in time during development, where you thought “this story has to be a specific kind of roleplaying game?”

Q: I think… “it has to be a roleplaying game” was a thing that I thought in the middle of 2020. The reason I thought that was sheer force of necessity. It had to be a roleplaying game because otherwise it wouldn’t be at all. It’s unfortunate to say that of course, but I appreciate you would expect me to give some sort of teary eyed testimony to my love for RPG’s, and I do love RPG’s… I initially wanted An Outcry to be a point-and-click adventure game. A thing I haven’t talked about much is that in middle-school I would play a lot of SCUMMVM games. Stuff like Sam & Max Hit The Road, Day of the Tentacle, y’know the LucasArts classics and such.

DH: I feel like I have to commit this to the record, but I have never played an adventure game.

Q: Oh. Honestly, a thing about adventure games and Europe is Europeans still fucking love them! We still go hard for adventure games. We’ve had three Tunguska sequels. We care about adventure games, dammit.

DH: You people are freaks. I know there’s so much history with the genre and how it appealed to so many people. How many different writers and artists got their start in them.

Q: The funny thing is here, and this will relativize everything I’ve just said about An Outcry needing to be an RPG or not being at all – a big issue that I ran into with making AN Outcry an adventure game is that combat and adventure games don’t. Mix. At all, and in the context of the story that I wanted to tell which is one of perseverance in the face of the world not wanting you there. A very mundane and normal world not wanting you there, it would have felt incomplete to not have any combat. Or to have all combat scenarios be these asinine little puzzles of “hey you did the floating text quick-time event properly, now you get to escape the battle, woo!”
It was just terrible. The moment I decided, the moment I realized I would have to use RPGmaker2003 if I wanted to make this game happen – which in the end was such a good decision because it led to other major design decisions in An Outcry that would really make the game sparkle. Like the B Button options, the options where you exit out of a conversation in order to get something that you’re not sure what it is, but it certainly isn’t just the crap you’ve been offered.
Also I was excited about RPGmaker2003 because it would mean I could create a battle system.
From the very start in the game design document that I’d written in the last quarter of 2020, I call the battle system a struggle system. RPGmaker2003 turns out to have not been the best thing to use to make a customized battle system, but I made it work somehow a little bit.

DH: It works pretty well, I find it funny the first time I played An Outcry during the holidays the first thing I latched onto in the first battles was…”there’s some kind of Mario and Luigi” thing going on here.

Q: It’s a funny thing you say that. Before my sprite animator and sprite artist, y’know character sprite artist specifically Bowser – no relation – made the current battle animations, I had made a temporary one that looked like the Unnamed was dancing like Mario & Luigi style. (hums mario & luigi battle music)

DH: I’m doing it in real life which is why my interviews aren’t on video.

Q: I know that that old version of An Outcry that old prologue demonstration is still out there.

DH: I wont ask you to dig that up. If some internet detective finds it, that’s on them.
I wanted to close this out – are you ready to tell people If you have any ideas bubbling up there?

Q: I very much do. I have an idea for a 3D project that I want to get started on sometime this year most likely in the second half. I’m also bubbling away at an idea for an expansion for one of my existing games that we’ve barely talked about here, there swings a skull, which features these two lovely lads who are married and in love.

DH: that is a very purple man.

Q: (laughs) It happens in a town that is under a scalding sun, and the man on the right does not have the advantage of excessive melanin in his skin. Very fried.

DH: A specific patina I see on a lot of older tourists. That’s cool – the idea of revisiting something older. I will let you close with a final statement on where people can find you.

Q: People can find me on http://patreon.com/quinnk and on twitter at https://twitter.com/QuinnPixelArt Otherwise they can not find me. It is also completely fine to not find me. I would in fact prefer it sometimes!

 

You can buy AN OUTCRY.  on Steam and Itch.Io