Just Doing What My Computer Is Telling Me To Do

The eternal game dev paradox in its natural habitat! Laptop literally on fire while coding, but hey, that's just "making games." Meanwhile, 90% of our time is spent in a fantasy land of thinking, talking, reading, and dreaming about making games. And don't forget playing other games "for research" (wink wink) while aggressively taking notes to convince ourselves it's productive work. The gap between our game dev fantasies and the burning reality of actually shipping code is basically the definition of our entire industry.

The ultimate graphics card betrayal! A 6-year-old GTX 1070 Ti absolutely demolishing the newer RTX 3050 in an arm wrestling match is the hardware equivalent of your grandpa outrunning you in a marathon. What makes this painfully accurate is that despite the RTX 3050 having ray tracing capabilities and being a newer generation, the ancient GTX 1070 Ti still outperforms it in raw power for many games and applications. Nvidia basically repackaged old tech, slapped "RTX" on it, and charged premium prices. Budget gamers who upgraded from older cards to the 3050 must feel like they've been scammed harder than people who buy "gaming" chairs that are just regular chairs with RGB lights.

Left: Game dev crying because Unity changed their pricing model and now they need a second mortgage to make a 2D platformer. Right: The bearded C++ developer who's been writing their own engine since 2003 and still hasn't released a game, but boy does that skybox rendering look crisp. It's the classic tradeoff - use a commercial engine and get destroyed by licensing fees, or build your own and get destroyed by feature creep. Either way, your game is never shipping.

The eternal developer graveyard of unfinished projects claims another victim. That suggestion to "finish your last project" might as well be suggesting cold fusion or dividing by zero. The look of pure existential dread says it all - we don't start projects, we merely begin permanent relationships with GitHub repos we'll eventually ghost. That folder labeled "projects" on your drive is basically a digital hospice where good intentions go to flatline.

Ah, the classic "let me unmask this villain" meme perfectly captures modern game development! A 2006 game like Oblivion somehow takes up 120GB after being "remastered" (aka slapping on some prettier textures). But pull off that mask and—surprise!—it's actually Unreal Engine 5 bloating everything up like it's getting paid by the gigabyte. Remember when games fit on a single CD? Now you need to clear half your SSD just to install the main menu. The storage requirements are expanding faster than my coffee budget during debugging week.

OH. MY. GOD. This is the coding equivalent of finding a HAIR in your GOURMET MEAL! 💀 Imagine spending TWO YEARS hunting for a performance bug while your game crawls like a snail having an existential crisis, only to discover you've got nested loops iterating through EVERY. SINGLE. PIXEL. of a sprite with a light diffusion algorithm running INSIDE that loop! 🔍 The absolute DRAMA of having your game's framerate PLUMMET because someone decided to process lighting effects with the computational efficiency of a potato calculator! And that recursive position_meeting() check? *faints dramatically* It's practically BEGGING the CPU to burst into flames! No wonder they had to rewrite the entire engine! This code is the reason therapists stay in business! 😭