341. The Real Jim Stormdancer (On My Birth Certificate)

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.