Posting On Reddit As An Indie Dev

When your Notepad app somehow needs 8GB of RAM just to display "Hello World" but some absolute madlad is out here trying to run GTA 5 on a PlayStation 3 with the processing power of a calculator watch. The duality of modern software development is absolutely UNHINGED. On one side, we've got bloated Electron apps that could probably run a small country's infrastructure but instead just... open text files. On the other side, game developers are performing literal black magic to squeeze every last drop of performance out of hardware that should've retired years ago. It's giving "I spent six months optimizing my sorting algorithm to save 2ms" versus "I just downloaded 47 npm packages to center a div." The contrast is *chef's kiss* levels of absurd.

The great GPU wars continue. Intel Arc arrives as "A New Hope" in December 2024, only for NVIDIA to immediately crush that hope with RTX 5070 in January as "The Empire Strikes Back." Then AMD swoops in with RX 9070 XT in March as "Return of the Jedi." Just another predictable chapter in the never-ending saga where your wallet is the true casualty. The Force is strong with price gouging.

OMG, someone actually created a programming language to write code for Scratch - you know, that block-based programming tool designed for CHILDREN! 💀 The absolute AUDACITY of creating a text-based compiler with Rust that outputs to Scratch! It's like building a rocket ship to drive to your mailbox! They even had the nerve to add GitHub Copilot support and error detection like it's some kind of serious development environment! Just look at that gorgeous code at the bottom - writing actual text to generate those cute little colorful blocks with the cat mascot. It's the programming equivalent of using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame! I'm DYING! 😭

The expectation vs. reality of game development in one perfect image! The bright-eyed optimist on the right is living in a fantasy world where making games is all creativity and fun. Meanwhile, the exhausted dev on the left has seen the dark side - the endless debugging of physics engines, memory leaks that appear only in production, and that one shader that refuses to compile for no logical reason. It's the classic "I'll just make a simple 2D platformer" that somehow morphs into "Why am I implementing my own quaternion math library at 4am?" pipeline. Game development: where your dreams go to get refactored into nightmares.

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

Game development expectation: Write elegant functions, see beautiful graphics. Game development reality: Scream in terror as your console spits out "Thing 1 happened" with zero context about what crashed your entire project at 3AM. The top panel shows the dream - neatly organized functions ready to execute. The bottom panel reveals the nightmare - Godot Engine running on a high-end RTX 4060 GPU, yet still only managing to tell you "Thing 1 happened" before your character clips through the floor and into the void for the 47th time today.