I'm going to have to apologize. I got DQ mixed up with a different hipster Twine game that I heard of at around the same timeframe. One that was no more than 10 or so panels and 3 lines of dialogue that also garnered a fair amount of attention. I confused the two (and no more than a brief Google search showed me that I had...)

At 40,000~ words + music/still graphics, DQ is a fair chunk of work.

Again, apologies. Definitely more than "next to nil" effort.