Don't Piss Off Your Texture Artist

The indie game dev experience in one perfect image. While everyone else is labeled "ME" doing all the visible work, there's that one poor soul circled in blue labeled "ALSO ME" clinging to the back of the car for dear life. That's your sanity hanging on by a thread while you try to be a one-person game studio. "I'll just wear all the hats," you said. "How hard could it be?" you asked. Now you're simultaneously the coder fixing bugs, the artist tweaking pixels, the marketer crafting tweets, and somehow still your own worst enemy sabotaging the whole operation with feature creep. The vehicle is somehow still moving forward though, so... success?

The great PC gaming love triangle has shifted, and honestly? It's giving character development. Back in 2020, PC gamers were out here side-eyeing their RAM while GPU manufacturers were living their best life, charging kidney prices for graphics cards during the crypto mining apocalypse. Fast forward to 2026, and suddenly RAM is the hot new thing everyone's fighting over while GPUs are collecting dust on shelves. Plot twist nobody saw coming: AI workloads are absolutely DEVOURING RAM like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Those fancy LLMs need 192GB just to load their morning coffee preferences. Meanwhile, GPU prices finally chilled out, so now we're all broke from buying RAM sticks instead. The hardware industry really said "you thought you were done spending money?" and switched the bottleneck on us. Truly diabolical.

Crawling through the desert of GPU prices while NVIDIA laughs all the way to the bank. The RTX 5090 costs a kidney and your firstborn at $3000, but somehow we still convince ourselves it's worth it for those extra 5 FPS in Minecraft. Meanwhile, the perfectly capable RX 9070 XT sits there at $850 like the reasonable choice nobody wants to make. Because nothing says "responsible adult" like eating ramen for six months to render ray-traced reflections in puddles slightly better.

PC gamers watching their dream GPU become financially out of reach because every tech bro and their startup suddenly needs a thousand H100s to train their "revolutionary" chatbot. Meanwhile, Nvidia's just casually handing out RTX 3060s like participation trophies while they rake in billions from the AI gold rush. Remember when you could actually buy a graphics card to, you know, play games? Yeah, Jensen Huang doesn't. The AI boom turned Nvidia from a gaming hardware company into basically the OPEC of machine learning, and gamers went from being their primary customers to an afterthought. Nothing says "we care about our roots" quite like throwing scraps to the community that built your empire.

Nothing says "I don't understand game development" quite like asking for a first-person mode in a 2D side-scroller. The dev's response is chef's kiss—comparing it to someone asking you to add beef and gravy to chocolate cupcakes. Sure, they're both food, but you've fundamentally misunderstood the assignment. Converting a hand-drawn 2D point-and-click game to first-person would require redrawing literally everything from a completely different perspective. It's not a feature request—it's asking you to make an entirely different game. The "get fancier later" caption on that beautiful hand-drawn barn really seals the deal. Yeah buddy, first-person mode is slightly beyond "fancier." TikTok users and feature creep, name a more iconic duo.

Anyone who's ever downloaded Unreal Engine knows the pain. You think you're getting a game engine, but what you're actually getting is a 100GB monstrosity that consumes your hard drive like a hungry beast. Epic's flagship product ships with every sample, demo, and texture known to mankind by default. Your options are: wait 3 hours for it to download or just buy a new SSD. Tim Sweeney (Epic's CEO) probably thinks storage space grows on trees.