Golden Handcuffs

The AUDACITY of thinking anyone would pay for your passion project! There you are, pouring your SOUL into crafting pixel-perfect gameplay while dressed as a literal clown. 🤡 The indie game dev dream: spend 5,000 hours creating your masterpiece only to sell exactly THREE copies (two of which are your parents). Meanwhile, some kid makes a game about a screaming goat and becomes an overnight millionaire. THE INJUSTICE! But you keep coding anyway, rainbow wig firmly in place, because what else would you do with your tragic existence? At least the circus has good benefits!

Frame-independent game physics is the hill many junior devs die on. Multiply all movement by deltaTime or watch your character zoom at light speed on a gaming PC and crawl like a snail on a potato. Skip this step and your boss will find you, and they will kill you. Not the crime mentioned in the meme, but an actual crime against humanity.

The ultimate recursive procrastination loop! This starterpack brutally exposes the indie game dev lifecycle with surgical precision. Instead of actually coding their game, devs spend countless hours making elaborate docs about worldbuilding, obsessing over engine choices, refreshing wishlists for dopamine hits, and watching YouTube tutorials they'll never implement. The "just write a book guy" with 50+ Google Docs but zero engine experience is painfully accurate. And that "thinking about a name for 2 months" hit way too close to home. Meanwhile, the "backseat dev" who thinks every problem is solved with "just add a shader" or "just add multiplayer" exists in every Discord server known to mankind. The imposter syndrome is real—nobody understands how much work goes into making a game until they've stared blankly at their code at 3AM wondering why their character controller is suddenly launching their protagonist into the stratosphere. And of course, there's always that one dev who buys every asset pack but never ships anything. The irony? Creating this starterpack was itself a form of procrastination. Meta-procrastination at its finest!

When your debugging session takes an unexpected turn and your code somehow ends up rendering a Minecraft scene instead of your application. That moment when you're expecting data visualization but get block visualization instead. The compiler took "build environment" a bit too literally.

When your game name triggers every profanity filter in existence, so you just lean into it. Embark Studios is basically saying "We're releasing *** ******* on October 30th" with all the confidence of someone who knows exactly what they're doing. It's the digital equivalent of responding "Yes, and?" to someone pointing out your flaws. Regex pattern matching gone hilariously wrong - somewhere a string validation function is having an existential crisis.

Ah, the classic dilemma of the paranoid developer. Rejecting the simple "Save Game" option because deep down we all know that's just begging for a crash. Meanwhile, the "Save and Exit Game" option gets the approving nod because it's like wearing both a belt AND suspenders. Why trust a single save operation when you can immediately retreat to safety? It's not paranoia if the code really is out to get you. The unspoken truth of game development: nothing validates your trust issues quite like losing three hours of progress because you dared to believe in a simple "Save" button.