Hewwo and welcome on my sideblog for all things gamedev, pixel art, and other digital creative endeavours! You might know me from my main blog, @queer-of-swords.
My tag for gamedev is #my games and my tag for zines is #my zines!
I use the "#repost tag" a lot for my reposts, so feel free to mute it if you're seeing too much of it!
Here are three of my latest games I'm particularly proud of:
There is such strength in becoming unpalatable.
Before things get serious, you really want to tell them you're ace!
A short game about lifting one's heavy heart up the hill.
You can find all my other games and zines on my itch.io page at noxether.itch.io.
You can find all my other links on my LinkStack, at linkstack.lgbt/@ether.
And you can support me and my work on my LiberaPay, at liberapay.com/dianthus!
Oh, and my current avatar was made by @tootkin-art, check them out!
I just got word that the BIGGEST LITTLE ZINE FAIR is accepting zines for its next fair, which will be held on Sunday May 31, 2026 in Long Beach, CA, USA.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
March 28 2026 (3/28/26)
You can submit up to 5 copies of 3 of your zines and they will be distributed by BLZF at their events. I have sold with them last year and can confirm they're legit. This is a great opportunity to share your work!
More info at the link above and in their FAQ here: https://biggestlittlezinefair.com/faq
One month and many shenanigans later, my little project went from this...
... to this!!
... It looks much better literally anywhere else but on Tumblr, but anyway.
It also works on my PHONE, which is very exciting:
[Video description: video of a smartphone running the game shown in the gif above.]
Thank you so much @tootkin-goblin for the cute art and the coding! I am besides myself with excitement.
I have also set up an inventory system that I'm probably going to scrap and we've been hard at work thinking of the other gameplay mechanics we want to have. My hope is to make a farming/cozy little game I can play on my phone or in my browser on the computer whenever I feel a bit down or need to pass some time. When I am satisfied, I will share it with others also!
One month and many shenanigans later, my little project went from this...
... to this!!
... It looks much better literally anywhere else but on Tumblr, but anyway.
It also works on my PHONE, which is very exciting:
[Video description: video of a smartphone running the game shown in the gif above.]
Thank you so much @tootkin-goblin for the cute art and the coding! I am besides myself with excitement.
I have also set up an inventory system that I'm probably going to scrap and we've been hard at work thinking of the other gameplay mechanics we want to have. My hope is to make a farming/cozy little game I can play on my phone or in my browser on the computer whenever I feel a bit down or need to pass some time. When I am satisfied, I will share it with others also!
the wording of this is a joke but I'm serious in the sense of solidarity with immigrant women, refugee women, women in exile, women in the 'global south', women in all countries where women's rights are being attacked.
It should go without saying that this includes trans women, since they are women.
women's rights include many things from trans rights (see above), reproductive rights, voting rights, labor rights, access to healthcare, access to education and many many more issues. These are usually not exclusively women's issues but often primarily or openly target women and people read as women.
A couple of my things are part of this amazing charity bundle, which raises funds for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. I don't think I need to tell any of you how important it is to support free immigrant law representation, public outreach and advocacy on the subject.
For just 10 USD, you can treat yourself to 1,439 games, zines, TTRPGs, etc; and support this very good and important cause.
I haven't been able to do much recently (or so it feels like) so I feel very proud to have been able to make this:
[Image ID: A gif of a Godot scene with a small moving sprite, a "next day" button with a button counter beneath it, and two large colorful rectangles with labels that read respectively "sprouted" and "bare". When the sprite touch one of the rectangle, it circles between "sprouted", then "bare", then "planted", then "watered". When the "next day" button is clicked, all "watered" rectangles become either "planted" or, on the third day, "sprouted". /end ID.]
I've been struggling a lot with putting a lot of pressure on my projects. Everything, every story, every game, every zine has to be the perfect thing that will save me, bring in money, make me feel better, cure the world, etc, so I have been trying to just poke around in Godot and have fun without thinking too much about the end result. So far, I have something like this!
I managed to code a lot of it on my own without @tootkin-goblin's input, and as someone who barely graduated high school I feel pretty proud of myself!
I don't know where to start. I've been telling myself, "I'd like to commemorate MEDUSA's publication, somehow" for a couple of weeks now. I wanted to do a sort of post-mortem, even though I associate post-mortems with Actual Projects(tm), ones that have a Goal and an Intention, where you can tell what went right and what went wrong because you had an idea of where you wanted to go in the first place.
With MEDUSA, I didn't really have a Goal or an Intention. It was more of a bitsy-shaped Fugue State.
What I had was a lot of fear. I was terrified. I had heard myself, with sheer horror, blurt out to my doctor, "actually, I will be undergoing a hormonal replacement therapy" a couple of months prior. I was, very slowly, very carefully, looking for someone to prescribe me hormones, while strongly believing that nobody would ever give me anything, because I was too fat, too chronically ill, too weird.
And that all was after eight or ten long years of telling myself and everyone else that I wasn't interested and that gender was more of an inconvenience than anything else, and could I just not be perceived at all, actually? I had been told by very smug, older, binary trans people that "my labels would change anyway" and I was dead-set on proving them wrong. I was also, subconsciously, waiting for my parents to pass away before I could start living my life.
This realisation was, for me, the trigger-- I couldn't wait for my parents to die, that was silly. They were themselves hellbent on living as long as possible, and wouldn't it be easier to live on with their rejection than to let my regrets outlive them? My own partner had cut contact with their parents. So it could be done. Even though I live with my parents, and need their financial support for my survival, I had to be brave. I could only live as myself.
So that's why I made MEDUSA. I made it for myself. I made it to externalize, to realize (as in, "make real"), the inner journey through my own dark forest, to my own alchemical crucible, my own altar, to become my own Gorgon. To call upon the help of my divine ancestors, my queer ancestors, all the passing spirits who look kindly upon me, and borrow some of their strength and courage.
It appears that it struck a chord. It's one of the greatest honors, joys and sorrows of my life that so many people have mentioned relating to MEDUSA. It truly is the most vulnerable, the rawest piece of art I have ever put towards the public eyes, and it's the one that's gotten the most visibility too. I am very proud of it, and I have submitted and will keep on submitting MEDUSA to all the jams, bundles, and other opportunities I see fit. It's bittersweet; each new comment makes me so happy, and yet so sad. I wish we didn't suffer so much. I wish nobody had to go through any of this.
But my hope, my hope is that the game helps you like it has helped me. I started HRT a month or so after publishing MEDUSA. My body has been changing in unexpected but delightful ways. My relationship to myself, to my parents and to the world at large has also evolved. I have so much more inner space, and I feel overall so much better. I can't regret not doing it sooner, because I know I was unable to (and the very kind, very good doctor who gives me access to gender care only started working in that area a couple of years ago) and I want to have compassion for the hurt and scared parts of myself and of my past. At the same time, I think I would have been so much happier, and everything else so much easier, if I had had access to gender care ten or twenty years ago.
So my hope is that everyone who plays the game will carry some of that strength within themselves-- or rather, that their own strength will be revealed to them in that way, and that they can move more freely going forward.
I am aware that post-mortems are supposed to have technical details, but I don't have any for you. I made more games, some of them on Bitsy, since MEDUSA; but I didn't make any in the last few months and nothing springs to mind regarding how I coded the game. I remember there were some hacks I could never make to work, and I do agree that the game is a bit verbose. I think it's part of its charms, and I did design it to be clunky and slow, to mirror the slow walk of the character, and the slow progress of one's own inner journey.
I think this is all I had to say about MEDUSA today. Thank you for playing the game, for commenting, and for reading this little celebratory ramble. I wish you joy and courage, softness and strength. May we all see a world in which we do not need to become our own Gorgons.
A couple of my things are part of this amazing charity bundle, which raises funds for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. I don't think I need to tell any of you how important it is to support free immigrant law representation, public outreach and advocacy on the subject.
For just 10 USD, you can treat yourself to 1,439 games, zines, TTRPGs, etc; and support this very good and important cause.
