How's Learning Game Dev Going

Ah, the classic bait and switch of career aspirations! You start with dreams of crafting the next Skyrim, then discover game devs work 80-hour crunch weeks for the privilege of being laid off after launch. But somehow in that hellscape, you accidentally fall in love with the craft itself. It's like going to a restaurant for the steak but staying for the bread basket. The gaming industry chewed you up, but at least you got a marketable skill that lets you build CRUD apps for insurance companies at reasonable hours!

The stark contrast between gaming industry titans and indie devs is painfully accurate. Triple-A studios burn through billions on live service games with battle passes and multiplayer features, then lay off developers even when games succeed. Meanwhile, some indie dev is like "I made a weird game about herding yaks up a mountain, please RT?" and gamers collectively lose their minds with enthusiasm. The beauty of indie development is how a quirky concept with passion behind it can generate more genuine excitement than a focus-grouped AAA title with a marketing budget larger than some countries' GDP. That screenshot with the yaks actually looks more interesting than 90% of AAA releases this year!

The four horsemen of the gaming apocalypse: opening Steam, scrolling through your massive library, realizing you don't want to play any of those games, then closing Steam. It's the same energy as staring into a fully stocked fridge and declaring "there's nothing to eat." Except you paid $3,000 for those leftovers during various sales. And you'll do it again tomorrow.

Expectation: A smiling, confident Mr. Incredible ready to create the next Fortnite. Reality: A hollow-eyed, traumatized soul who just learned that their game engine doesn't support the feature they designed their entire concept around. Nothing transforms a bright-eyed dreamer into a sleep-deprived ghoul faster than discovering your physics engine has a memory leak and your deadline is tomorrow. The duality of gamedev: fantasizing about creative freedom while actually drowning in shader compilation errors.

Ah, the mysterious cloud save from the year 1601 — clearly from when your medieval ancestor was debugging the first JavaScript framework on their stone tablet. Meanwhile, your save from 2025 suggests you've been living in the future. Time travel: the unexpected side effect of cloud synchronization that no one mentioned in the documentation. Choose wisely, traveler. That 1601 save probably doesn't include your NFT collection or quantum blockchain commits.

The eternal struggle of every developer who's also a PC enthusiast. There you are, whiteboard marker in hand, desperately explaining frame rates, upgrade paths, Steam sales, and how "but can it run Crysis?" is still somehow relevant in 2023. Meanwhile, your friends stare blankly, wondering why you're having a religious experience over hardware specs when they just want to play FIFA. Two hours later, you're drawing memory architecture diagrams while they've mentally checked out to plan their PS5 purchase. The kicker? They'll text you next week asking for PC build advice anyway.