How's Learning Game Dev Going

The eternal hardware arms race strikes again! Console gamers (depicted as happy little Squirtles) are devastated when a game is next-gen only, meaning they need to shell out $500 for a new console. Meanwhile, PC gamers are practically having a Victorian death scene when a new game requires RTX GPUs - because that's not just $500, that's potentially $1500+ for a graphics card that's perpetually "out of stock" or "slightly cheaper than a kidney on the black market." The irony? Both groups will still find a way to buy the hardware while complaining about ramen dinners for the next six months.

The AUDACITY of real life to interrupt a perfectly good simulation game! 💅 Marriage can wait, but these virtual citizens NEED their roller coasters and public bathrooms RIGHT NOW! The bride isn't just getting cold feet—she's getting carpal tunnel from optimizing her park layout while wearing a $3000 wedding dress. Talk about priorities, sweetie! That RGB keyboard isn't going to click itself, and those virtual park guests aren't going to entertain themselves! The vows can wait until she's achieved a five-star rating, thank you very much!

Ah, the modern gaming "enthusiast" in their natural habitat. This specimen has evolved to simultaneously complain about lack of innovation while refusing to play anything that doesn't match their exact preferences. The "$6000 battle pass purchasing machine" hits way too close to home. Dropping a small fortune on hardware just to play the same recycled games and then complaining about it? Chef's kiss of irony. My favorite part is how "thinking" and "originality" are listed under "SLOP" while "giving companies money" is "BASED." Nothing says discerning consumer like hating creativity while worshipping corporate wallets. The gaming industry's perfect customer doesn't exi—oh wait, there they are, threatening self-harm if exposed to a new experience. Meanwhile, their unbroken 4-year subscription to someone playing games for them continues...

The eternal struggle of indie game devs on Reddit: First panel, they post "SUPPORT INDIE DEVELOPERS" with noble intentions. Second panel, they follow up with "MY GAME IS WISHLIST IF IT APPEALS TO YOU!" - a perfectly reasonable request. Third and fourth panels? The same person who was just preaching about supporting indies is now glaring with the fury of a thousand compiler errors. The cognitive dissonance of wanting indie games to succeed... unless they're being promoted in their Reddit feed. It's like saying "I love open source" but then blocking all GitHub notification emails.

Unreal Engine out here acting like your helicopter parent, telling you your beast of a machine with an RTX 5090 and 14900KF isn't good enough to run at 1440p 60fps because it insists on strangling everything through a single thread. Meanwhile, id Tech Engine is the cool uncle who shows up and says "use ALL the cores, kid" and delivers billion FPS on a toaster. The difference? id Software actually knows how to write multithreaded code that doesn't make your CPU cry. They've been optimizing game engines since Carmack was writing assembly in his sleep. Unreal just keeps adding more AI-upscaling band-aids instead of fixing the fundamental performance issues. It's 2024 and we're still dealing with engines that can't properly utilize modern hardware. id Tech proves it's possible, but everyone else would rather blame your GPU than admit their engine is running like it's 2005.

The eternal battle between pragmatism and the programmer's ego. When someone says "just use an existing engine," what they're really saying is "please don't spend the next 18 months building a half-broken physics system when Unity exists." But here we are, drawing our own circle from scratch because clearly no one in history has ever implemented collision detection correctly. It's like deciding to forge your own kitchen knife when you just wanted to make a sandwich. "But MY knife will have a slightly different handle grip!" Cool story. Meanwhile your game idea is collecting dust, and you're debugging quaternion math at 3AM.