Thinking How Cool It Would Be To Make A PC Game Vs. Actually Making One

Ah, the gaming industry's version of a Catch-22. Warner Bros just axed multiple game studios regardless of their performance. It's like working at a restaurant where the chef gets fired whether the food is terrible, amazing, or breaks Michelin star records. The gaming industry's new business strategy: "Let's fire everyone and see if that helps quarterly earnings." Spoiler alert: it won't, but some executive will get a nice bonus for "optimizing workforce resources." Nothing says "we value creativity" like shutting down studios that made incredibly successful games. Next quarter's strategy meeting: "Why can't we find good talent?"

The duality of computing in one perfect meme! On the left, we've got Buff Doge calculating the millionth Fibonacci number faster than you can finish reading about it—pure computational flex. Meanwhile, Crying Doge on the right is having an existential crisis trying to run a decades-old game that probably required less processing power than your smart fridge. Nothing captures the absurdity of modern computing better than having machines that can simulate nuclear explosions but choke on legacy code written when dial-up was considered high-tech. The true paradox of our industry: simultaneously too powerful and not compatible enough.

The career path of a developer who started by hacking game ROMs is like finding out your coworker used to be in a cult. Normal devs learned Python in high school, but the ROM hackers were out there reverse-engineering assembly code at age 12 just to make Mario wear a cowboy hat. Now they're sitting next to you debugging TypeScript with thousand-yard stares, permanently damaged by their formative years of hex editing and wondering why modern languages have so many "unnecessary features" like memory management.

Left side: Regular 3D rotation math with sines and cosines. Complex but manageable if you've ever implemented a camera system. Right side: Quaternions. Four-dimensional math that makes rotation calculations significantly more efficient but looks like someone dropped acid while reading a linear algebra textbook. Game developers be like: "Yes, I understand quaternions perfectly" while secretly copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow and praying it doesn't introduce gimbal lock.

The eternal struggle of graphics programming in six panels. Anyone who's dealt with transparency knows it's not just a technical challenge—it's psychological warfare. Alpha blending, z-buffering, sorting issues... one minute everything renders perfectly, the next your UI is showing through walls or your water texture looks like a portal to another dimension. And don't get me started on glass shaders. The number of times I've stared at a screen at 3 AM wondering why my transparent objects are rendering in front of opaque ones is frankly traumatic. Whoever said "just make it see-through" clearly never had to implement it.

Ah yes, modern gaming in a nutshell! A massive bear labeled "NEW AAA GAMES" requiring a nuclear-powered rig with "RTX 5090, AMD RX 7900, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD" just to launch the title screen. Meanwhile, the humble wolf "DOOM 1993" runs perfectly on a calculator with "CPU, GPU (OPTIONAL)" specs. The real joke? That GitHub Actions workflow is gonna time out before your AAA game even finishes downloading the shader cache. Meanwhile, DOOM is probably already running on your CI/CD pipeline's error logs.