Game design Memes

Posts tagged with Game design

What The Hell Happened To This Game?

What The Hell Happened To This Game?
When your horror game project goes through executive review and marketing focus groups... Started with a terrifying monster bus straight from your nightmares, ended with dancing unicorns and DJs with sunglasses. Classic corporate evolution where someone inevitably says "but will this appeal to the TikTok demographic?" It's the same transformation that turned Resident Evil into a dance party and Dead Space into a microtransaction store. Next thing you know, they'll add battle passes to Tetris and loot boxes to Pong.

Choose Your Game Dev Philosophy: Easy, Fair, Or Pure Sadism

Choose Your Game Dev Philosophy: Easy, Fair, Or Pure Sadism
Ah, the three horsemen of game difficulty philosophy: Kojima: "Let's make it so easy that even someone who can't beat the first level of Pac-Man can finish it!" Miyazaki: "Everyone should experience the same challenge and overcome it in their own way. It builds character!" Itagaki: "Testers complained it was too hard? MAKE IT HARDER. Their tears sustain me." Choose your game dev philosophy wisely. Your future therapy bills depend on it.

Computer Science Student Specialization

Computer Science Student Specialization
The hierarchy of suffering in CS specializations perfectly captured in Toy Story scenes: Cybersecurity and Game Design students? Living the Buzz Lightyear dream - endless identical clones, mass-produced and overconfident. "To infinity and beyond!" (aka "I'll be making six figures right after graduation!") Operating Systems students? That's Woody with the maniacal grin. Sure, they're dealing with kernel panics and memory management, but they're still maintaining their sanity... barely. But those poor souls specializing in Compilers? Straight to the lava pit of despair. They're drowning in parsing algorithms, abstract syntax trees, and the existential dread that comes with implementing a lexer from scratch. Not even the garbage collector can save them from this hell.

Developers Always Manage To Make It Work

Developers Always Manage To Make It Work
The absolute pinnacle of software engineering isn't elegant code—it's the unholy workarounds that ship products. Fallout 3 devs couldn't implement a working train, so they just strapped a train model onto an NPC's head and made him run underground. The player never sees the difference. After 15 years in the industry, I can confirm this is basically how 90% of production software works. Your banking app? Probably running on a hamster wearing a server rack hat somewhere.

The Hierarchy Of CS Student Suffering

The Hierarchy Of CS Student Suffering
The hierarchy of pain in CS specializations is too real. Cybersecurity and game design folks living the Buzz Lightyear dream - shiny, exciting, and mass-produced. Operating systems specialists get the Woody treatment - still relevant but definitely sweating. Then there's the compiler students... burning in literal hell, questioning every life choice that led them to parsing syntax trees and debugging segmentation faults for eternity. The compiler specialization isn't just hard mode - it's masochism with extra steps. And yet, those compiler wizards are the ones who make everything else possible. Suffering builds character, they say... mostly to justify the trauma.

This Is What Studying Game Theory As A Gamedev Feels

This Is What Studying Game Theory As A Gamedev Feels
When your professor explains game theory with complex mathematical notation, but all you wanted was to make the next Fortnite killer. That's literally just a chicken to you. The gap between theoretical game theory (with its Nash equilibriums and utility functions) and actually making fun games is wider than the chasm between promised deadlines and actual ship dates. The bearded professor proudly displays his chicken as if it's the Rosetta Stone of gaming while you're just wondering if your character's jump animation looks natural enough.

I Sense Danger Ahead

I Sense Danger Ahead
That moment when your brain finally processes what's happening. First you're celebrating the jackpot of health and ammo like you just found free pizza in the break room. Then reality hits—this isn't generous game design, it's the calm before the storm. The devs aren't your friends; they're preparing you for the boss fight from hell that's about to delete your weekend. Same energy as finding perfectly commented code in a legacy codebase... right before discovering why they needed all those comments.

The Horrifying Reality Behind The Gamedev Mask

The Horrifying Reality Behind The Gamedev Mask
Behind every "game developer" label lurks a nightmare of vector math, 3D modeling, shader programming, and eight other specialized disciplines that would make most CS grads curl into a fetal position. It's like claiming you're a "car maker" when in reality you're simultaneously the metallurgist, electrical engineer, upholsterer, and safety tester all while trying not to set yourself on fire. The mask stays on because nobody runs away screaming when you just say "gamedev."

The Horrifying Reality Behind The Gamedev Mask

The Horrifying Reality Behind The Gamedev Mask
The facade of a game developer is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind that innocent "Gamedev" mask lurks a horrifying reality of vector math nightmares, 3D modeling hell, light baking purgatory, and the special circle of dante's inferno reserved for custom shader development. They keep the mask on because revealing the eldritch knowledge required to make that cute jumping fox game would instantly turn onlookers to stone. "Let's keep this on" isn't just a preference—it's a public safety measure.

The Modern Game Development Dilemma

The Modern Game Development Dilemma
Game developers caught in the eternal tug-of-war between hardcore veterans and the lucrative casual market. Turns out making games for people who actually know how to play them doesn't pay as well as catering to little Timmy who just got his mom's iPad and her entire bank account. Why spend years perfecting intricate game mechanics when you can slap together a shiny microtransaction factory with auto-aim and participation trophies? The industry's race to the bottom continues, one simplified tutorial at a time.

The Soulslike Escape Maneuver

The Soulslike Escape Maneuver
The eternal trap of game development. That gorgeous RPG with stunning visuals? Suddenly loses all appeal when you discover it's "Soulslike" - code for "you'll die 500 times to the tutorial boss while questioning your life choices." No one admits it, but we all do that SpongeBob walk-away-quickly move when we see that genre tag. Beautiful graphics are just the honeypot before the pain begins. It's like writing perfect documentation for code that crashes on launch.

Does It Scare You, My Fellow Game Developers?

Does It Scare You, My Fellow Game Developers?
Finnish indie games have become the stuff of legend in dev circles. These Nordic madlads create nightmare fuel wrapped in innocent-looking packages. Think Control , Alan Wake , or those surreal horror experiences that haunt Steam. They've mastered the art of making games that are simultaneously brilliant and deeply unsettling. The rest of us are just trying to make our collision detection work while they're over there bending reality and psychological horror into digital art forms. Their power cannot be contained by mere game engines.