We Have Time Left, Let's Add Something Funny That No One Will Read

Steam sales hit different when you're a developer with a backlog of 847 unplayed games. Your rational brain knows you have enough games to last until retirement, but Steam's showing you a 90% discount on some indie roguelike you'll definitely "play later." The logic doesn't matter anymore—it's not about playing games, it's about owning them. Your library becomes a digital hoard, a monument to good deals and poor impulse control. Every seasonal sale is just another intervention that nobody shows up to because they're all too busy buying games they won't play either.

The infamous "This is fine" meme, but make it solo game dev edition ! That poor cartoon dog sitting calmly with coffee while surrounded by the flames of game development hell: broken code that refuses to compile, paralyzing fear of failure, constant stress, motivation that ghosted you three months ago, and the ever-present imposter syndrome whispering "you're not a real developer" while you frantically Google how to fix that one physics bug for the 47th time. But hey, at least you have... coffee? ☕

The high-refresh-rate rabbit hole claims another victim. Once you've experienced the buttery smoothness of 144 FPS gaming, your standards get completely warped. Suddenly 60 FPS—which used to be the gold standard we all dreamed about—feels like watching a PowerPoint presentation. Your GPU is crying, your electricity bill is skyrocketing, but you refuse to compromise because "I just don't think at this age I'm meant to live an uncomfortable life." The gaming equivalent of refusing to drink anything but top-shelf liquor after that one time you splurged.

The duality of a programmer's financial decision-making. Agonizing over a $50 purchase for basic necessities, but dropping $2500+ on a new PC with the emotional investment of someone commenting on the weather. "Yes, very sad. Anyway." The RAM wasn't going to upgrade itself, and those compile times weren't getting any shorter on the old machine. It's not an addiction if you can justify it with "productivity gains."

Indie game devs can't catch a break in the release calendar hunger games. First they dodge Silksong (the eternally delayed Hollow Knight sequel that would steal all their attention), only to find themselves up against Hades 2 instead. It's like carefully planning your product launch to avoid the Apple keynote, then discovering Google decided to drop their new tech the same day. That two-week marketing window just collapsed faster than my will to fix non-breaking legacy code.

Game devs live in a universe where physics simulations, particle effects, and complex AI pathfinding are just "Tuesday morning tasks," but adding a cosmetic item like a scarf? That's apparently where the engine decides to have an existential crisis. The contrast is beautiful—rendering a demon erupting from molten lava with real-time particle effects and collision detection is trivial, but cloth physics or character customization? Now we're talking about refactoring the entire rendering pipeline. It's the classic case of "we built this system to do one specific thing really well, and now you want to add a feature we never considered." Turns out the game's architecture was designed around demons and explosions, not fashion accessories. Welcome to game development, where complexity is completely arbitrary and nothing makes sense until you're knee-deep in the codebase.