Strange How Every Literal Idea For Stop Killing Games Is Apparently Impossible

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.

The eternal emotional rollercoaster of indie game development. Left panel: "Oh look, someone's actually paying for my game that took 3 years to make!" Right panel: "...and they got it for $1 during a Steam sale, so I'll make approximately enough to buy half a cup of coffee." That feeling when your passion project becomes a financial rounding error. But hey, at least they didn't torrent it.

Nothing captures the soul-crushing disappointment of mobile game reality quite like this. Those flashy ads show some revolutionary gameplay experience with stunning graphics and deep mechanics. Then you download it and—surprise!—it's just another idle clicker that bombards you with microtransactions every 30 seconds. After 15 years in development, I've seen this same bait-and-switch tactic evolve from "slightly misleading" to "practically criminal." Remember when games were just... games? Now they're psychological experiments designed to extract maximum revenue from your wallet while delivering minimum enjoyment. The perfect game for this meme? Literally any mobile game released in the last five years. Pick one. Any one.

OMG, THIS CODE IS A CRIME SCENE! 😱 Look at that absolute MONSTROSITY of variable declarations stretching from line 24 to line 140! That's not code, that's a developer's cry for help written in syntax! The poor soul who has to maintain this Unity game is probably rocking back and forth in a corner somewhere. I mean, who needs comments and organization when you can just VOMIT 108 LINES OF VARIABLES into your class? Bonus points for that sad little empty Start() method at the bottom, just sitting there like "please... I just want to initialize something... ANYTHING!"

That moment when your innocent game creation suddenly attracts the wrong kind of attention. For the uninitiated, "R34" refers to "Rule 34" of the internet: "If it exists, there is adult content of it." Game devs spend countless hours perfecting gameplay mechanics, narrative arcs, and character development—only to watch in horror as the internet's first contribution is... explicit fan art. The duality of the facial expressions perfectly captures the mental journey from "My game is getting noticed!" to "Wait, not like that!"

The financial restraint of gamers is inversely proportional to the discount percentage. At 50% off? "HOLD!" Still waiting. 70% off? "HOLD!" Not good enough. But when that sweet, sweet 95% discount hits? Suddenly we're all William Wallace charging into battle screaming "SUPPORT THE DEVS!" as if we didn't just wait for the game to cost less than a coffee. The cognitive dissonance of feeling like industry champions while essentially waiting for games to be practically free is the silent agreement between gamers and their empty wallets.