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A CABINET IN THE ARCADE · ONE PLAYER · NO HIGH SCORES

QUILL DRIFT

Loose quills drift across a dark field. You steer Esmx the Porkypine, our community mascot, and a quill joins the mane on contact and only on contact — because a porcupine cannot throw one, and this game has no verb for it.

QUILL DRIFT

One player. No timer, no lives, no score, nothing chasing you and nothing to defeat.

ESMX THE PORKYPINE
IN
QUILL DRIFT

ARROWS, WASD OR THE PAD BELOW
WALK INTO A QUILL TO KEEP IT

THIS CABINET NEEDS JAVASCRIPT.
EVERYTHING THE GAME IS ABOUT
IS WRITTEN OUT BELOW.

The screen is dark. Nothing moves in this cabinet until you start it, and it never makes a sound.

HOW FAST DOES THIS GO?

YOUR ESMX

0 OF 12 QUILLS

Esmx starts bare. Every quill you walk into is written down here in words as well as drawn above, because a mane nobody can read is a mane nobody can tell anybody else about.

WHAT QUILL DRIFT WILL NOT DO

  • It will not let you throw anything. Porcupines cannot shoot their quills — they cannot throw them, fire them or launch them; a quill comes away in whatever touched it. A spiky mascot invites exactly the opposite reading, so this game has no such verb in it. Contact is the only mechanic.
  • It will not chase you. There is nothing else on that field. Nothing arrives to take a quill back, and there is no way to lose one.
  • It will not time you. No clock, no lives, no score, no streak, no best-ever. The count is a count of what you have, and it only goes up.
  • It will not make a noise. Not one, ever, at any setting. An arcade that was silent by choice seemed better than an arcade that was silent until it wasn’t.
  • It will not remember you. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, and closing the tab is the whole of quitting.

WHO ESMX IS, AND WHY THERE IS A GAME AT ALL

Esmx the Porkypine — part pig, part porcupine, with a bit of goblin in there — is the Stimpunks Foundation’s community mascot. We commissioned them; the artist is Kaya Oldaker, and her name goes on the drawing wherever it appears, because attribution here is a licence and a courtesy rather than a question of who holds the rights. Esmx’s pronouns are they/them, and the name comes from Esmeralda Weatherwax and the Witches of Discworld. The x is deliberate.

Esmx’s mane evokes the spiky profile, and the spikes are a mix of the autism spectrum’s colours and the LGBT+ flag’s, because there is heavy overlap between the two. Kaya’s notes say the spikes trail off and separate, as if they are made of energy, and that they can trail off and create patterns. A game about loose quills drifting across a dark field is that sentence with a d-pad attached.

An arcade in particular, because Kaya says so: Esmx resembles a Sonic character or a Pokémon on purpose, due to their popularity within the Autistic community. This room is not a costume we put on the mascot. It is where the mascot already came from.

WHY THIS IS A NEW DRAWING

Esmx is ours to reproduce — we hold the rights and Kaya’s originals are a download away. The Esmx on that screen is built from scratch in this room’s line anyway, the way the Quillery’s eight were, and not because anybody needed permission. A pasted PNG would have been the only thing in this arcade that came from somewhere else, in a room whose whole argument is that it shares nothing with the rooms next door. And a variant is the thing the licence goes out of its way to ask for: feel free to customise! Make variants of Esmx to represent your community. Taking our own invitation seemed like the least we could do with it. The marks we kept are the ones that make Esmx Esmx: the snout, the earring in one ear, the chunk out of the other, and a mane that comes apart at the tips.

The original, every official variant, the blank template and the download are on Esmx’s own page. If you share any of them, include alt text — Kaya asked, and honouring a licence is the easy half of honouring a maker.

“Esmx” by Kaya Oldaker is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; this variant likewise. That credit line is the one on Esmx’s own page and it stays on ours — owning a commission is not a reason to stop saying whose hand drew it. The quill facts behind the house rules are in the Quillery, which sources them. Full credits are in the liner notes.

THE DIAL AND THE SPEED KNOBS

These do different jobs. The dial governs the room — the glow behind the cabinets, the marquee bulbs. Each cabinet has its own speed knob, and the player holds that.

The dial picks the knob’s starting position — Slow if you arrived on Gentle — and then stops having an opinion. All three speeds are here at every dial setting. A Gentle that quietly handed you a different game would be the “lite version” mistake with a joystick on it.

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so — and nothing in this room makes a sound at all.