The Temptation To Waste Money Can Be Strong

LinkedIn optimization at its finest. Rejecting the harsh reality of "broke and unemployed" in favor of the much more impressive "full time indie game developer" – which is technically the same thing but with a Steam page that has 3 wishlists (all from family members). The resume gap becomes a "focused development period" and ramen dinners transform into "startup culture."

Ah, the classic "queue position: 235,300,400" screen. That's not a player count—that's how many coffees you'll need before getting into the game. Remember when we thought 500 concurrent users was a stress test? Game companies now be like "let's invite the entire population of Earth minus New Zealand" to beta test. And they're shocked when their four potato servers burst into flames. Next time someone asks me to scale our app, I'm just gonna show them this and say "but can it handle Battlefield launch day traffic?"

Ah, the eternal graveyard of half-finished projects. That last panel perfectly captures the existential rage when someone suggests you actually complete something instead of starting yet another shiny new endeavor. The audacity of suggesting we confront our digital skeletons! Making a game or learning SQL? Those are just future abandoned projects waiting to happen. But finishing what we started? That's the real horror story. The developer's GitHub is basically a cemetery of repositories last updated 3 years ago with commit messages like "initial commit" and "will finish tomorrow."

Every developer's nightmare: spending days debugging that "impossible" bug only for some speedrunner to reliably reproduce it with bizarre hardware configurations. You meticulously document "not reproducible" in JIRA, close the ticket, and BAM—someone with an overclocked GPU and 37 Chrome tabs finds it instantly. Then when you fix THAT specific edge case, another one appears! The endless cycle of "it works on my machine" followed by the crushing realization that your code is at the mercy of hardware chaos. The skeleton represents your soul leaving your body after the fifth "actually, I can reproduce it every time" email.

Microsoft wants $80 for Visual Studio? *dramatically removes sunglasses in horror* But wait! Subscription services for games? Xbox Game Pass? Ubisoft+? PlayStation Plus? Even the ESA (Entertainment Software Association)? *puts sunglasses back on coolly* The duality of developers: outraged at paying for coding tools while happily throwing money at gaming subscriptions. The compiler judge you silently.

Anyone who's ever downloaded Unreal Engine knows the pain. You think you're getting a game engine, but what you're actually getting is a 100GB monstrosity that consumes your hard drive like a hungry beast. Epic's flagship product ships with every sample, demo, and texture known to mankind by default. Your options are: wait 3 hours for it to download or just buy a new SSD. Tim Sweeney (Epic's CEO) probably thinks storage space grows on trees.