How's Learning Game Dev Going

THE AUDACITY! Someone's out here trying to run Cyberpunk 2077 on what's essentially a digital fossil! 💀 Imagine blaming game developers for your prehistoric Dell Optiplex that was outdated when Obama was first elected! It's like showing up to an F1 race with a horse and cart and wondering why you can't keep up. That poor machine is begging for retirement while this person is demanding it render 4K explosions. The only thing that computer can run smoothly is Windows XP and maybe—MAYBE—Minesweeper if you're not too aggressive with the clicks.

Remember when NVIDIA politely asked you to upgrade your graphics card? Those were the days. Now they sit on their silicon throne, looking down at us mere mortals with contempt. "Buy our $2000 GPU or continue living in your pathetic low-polygon world, peasant." The transformation from humble tech company to aristocratic overlord is complete. And we just keep throwing money at them like the desperate frame-rate addicts we are.

That's the Portal cake logo with "The MSRP is a lie" repeated like a dystopian mantra. Graphics card prices haven't been this fictional since cryptocurrency miners were building rigs in their mothers' basements. Manufacturers slap on MSRPs that belong in fantasy novels while retailers mark them up to "market value" – which is corporate speak for "whatever desperate gamers will pay." Nothing says "modern computing" like needing a second mortgage for a GPU that'll be obsolete before you finish paying it off.

The career trajectory we never planned for! First, you naively enter game development with stars in your eyes and a degree in hand. Then reality hits—80-hour weeks debugging collision detection, players complaining your water physics aren't "realistic enough," and that one producer who keeps saying "just one more feature." Before you know it, you're burnt out, staring at your IDE with the thousand-yard stare of someone who's implemented the same login screen 37 times. Finally, you reach enlightenment: reject complexity, embrace photosynthesis. Your plants don't have merge conflicts, don't need standups, and never ask "but can we make it pop more?" The ultimate escape from dependency hell is growing actual tomatoes instead of maintaining npm packages with tomato-related names.

The mythical moment has arrived! After years of being asked "but can it run Crysis?" as the ultimate PC benchmark question, someone finally leveraged this meme into an actual job offer. Crysis (2007) was so notoriously demanding that even modern systems struggle with it at max settings. The formal frog gentleman's announcement perfectly captures that surreal professional victory when your obscure gaming knowledge suddenly becomes a legitimate technical qualification. The interview probably went: "What's your experience with hardware stress testing?" "Well, I've been running Crysis since 2007..." "YOU'RE HIRED!"

The absolute AUDACITY of this developer printing an entire chess board for EACH POSSIBLE MOVE! 😱 Instead of creating a simple reusable function, this maniac is hard-coding 2.6 MILLION lines to handle every chess position! It's the programming equivalent of writing out every word in the dictionary instead of just looking it up! The poor soul who has to review this code will need therapy AND a new keyboard after smashing the current one into oblivion. Chess programming doesn't have to be your villain origin story, people!