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Topic LordsThe only place on the internet you can hear topics discussed! Author: Jim Stormdancer
Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week. Language: en-us Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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341. The Real Jim Stormdancer (On My Birth Certificate)
Monday, 4 May, 2026
Lords: Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Noel https://noelcody.itch.io/ Topics: Moss Moss design & process Being gaslit by an open-source 3D physics engine ACME products Splinter by Carl Sandburg https://allpoetry.com/poem/14327262-Splinter-by-Carl-Sandburg Microtopics: Blippo+ Wearing merch for a TV show in the Blippo+ cosmology. The bureau where you keep your cotton. Mossing the world and finding secrets. Designing for mystery and discovery. A platformer with no skill checks. The standard puzzle game playbook. Designing your game to offer one question per screen. Pig Farm. Discovering your way through a story. What to show and what to hide Collecting leaves that grow a vine up to something at the top. Cats or rabbits or turnips or something. An underrated comment on the Pico-8 BBS. A secret at the end of the game that you try to be okay with most players not finding. Play testing with your local game dev scene. Various Pico-8 data compression strategies. Code golfing until you can't stand it. Ending every project in a nightmare slog. PARENS-8. How Pico-8 makes constraints feel real and not like some arbitrary bullshit you decided to do. Forking Pico-8 and expanding the token limit to 8193. 50 years of game designs to draw examples from. Spikes. Bounding your understanding of the space. The satisfying feeling of playing a good XAMWWSKH. Lions sculpted out of hedges that want to give you a big hug. Creatures in the game world just going about your business in a way that can aid or hinder you. Just lil dudes, just hanging out. The feeling of being outside the bounds of a game world. Lunacid. Games that don't know you're playing them. The pickup truck you can just barely spot in Pokemon Red. Interpreting data as a compressed Pokemon. Trying to make an N64 game because Pyrite 64 came out Testing on your Summer Cart. Choosing the physics engine that only supports cubes. Lateral friction. Reading about video game car physics on the Internet and getting so desperate that you start asking the LLMs. Four wheels all applying different forces in different conditions. What Google indexes now rather than text on the Internet. A heavily abbreviated transcript. Nearly 20,000 microtopics. microtopics_ebooks. An ebook written by many uncredited people. Collecting 30,000 Bug Mars Work Visa signatures. Informing your users that you are collecting their personal information but only in order to improve the contents of your wallet. Zenith Electronics Is. The game developers who broke off of Activision to form Accolade looking in the dictionary to find a name that's come earlier than Activision in alphabetical listings, and then the game developers who broke off from Accolade to form Acclaim doing the same thing. Going to a movie theater in the 1930s because that's how you see the memes. Hanna-Barbera inventing a new animation technique where they give everybody a collar so they can animate their head and body separately. Disney replacing animators with photocopiers in the 1950s. A medium's technical limitations eventually becoming an art style. How often did they make the Looney Tunes? How many Looney Tunes are there? Shorts that play before the main feature. The DJ in the projection booth deciding what Looney Tune will drive the crowd wildest. How many movies are made each year. When the MPAA was established. Which Looney Tunes did they play in front of the R-rated movies? A splinter of singing. If you say hello a thousand times, is the thousandth time actually a goodbye? Eating the last grilled cheese sandwich of your life, and either being aware of it or not aware of it. Crickets going extinct every winter and re-evolving in the spring. Crickets becoming locusts in the winter and seeing how many divine plagues they can enact before springtime. Entomology Blog: you're totally full of shit. Walking towards a cricket and it stops chirping and you're like "how am I supposed to hunt you down and eat you now?" The science weighs in: we won't be able to visit the aliens, but we will be able to send them a plague of locusts.
