348. A Normal Spud Gun for Normal Children

From Topic Lords by Jim Stormdancer

June 22, 2026 · 1h 7m

About this episode

The episode discusses various topics including movies, game development, and making friends as an adult.

Lords: Kate Andrew Topics: Movies that are supposed to be good and kind of annoyingly are actually good Making friends when you're old Paris's pneumatic mail system Forgiven, by A. A. Milne https://www.poeticous.com/a-a-milne/forgiven-i-found-a-little-beetle-so-that-beetle-was-his-name Microtopics: The skill to make the noises that are in your head. Writing quests for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Sanrio's NDA-enforcing snipers. A crocodile that was invented in 1978. Writing quests that force the artists to figure out how a crocodile would wear sunglasses. Writing the dialog tree as the player is clicking on options, like Gromit placing tracks right as the train is about to roll over them. Spending five years shipping the first part of a live service game and then shipping additional parts every few weeks. Trying to rebuild a house while someone is living in it. Lingo 2. Dungeon Gals. The kind of game you can't draw a map of. Teetering on the razor's edge of "I'm a genius" and "I don't understand anything." What does the developer tooling look like for games that have non-euclidean spaces? Duplicated spaces with secret warp volumes. The kind of movie that an Infinite Jest reader…

People in this episode

Host: Jim Stormdancer

Guest: Kate Andrew

Topics covered

movies
making friends
game development
non-euclidean spaces
writing quests
adventure movies

Keywords

movies
game development
non-euclidean spaces
writing quests
adventure movies
A. A. Milne
Terry Cavanagh

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Forgiven, by A. A. Milne