Just Make It Exist First

The SpongeBob meme perfectly captures the absurd evolution of game development. In the 90s, indie developers crafted masterpieces with limited resources, while today's AAA studios demand you sacrifice a kidney for a GPU just to run their unoptimized code. The irony is palpable - billion-dollar studios shipping games requiring NASA-grade hardware (5090 GPU? Come on!) while tiny indie teams create beautiful, efficient experiences that run on practically anything. It's the classic "throwing hardware at a software problem" approach. Why optimize your spaghetti code when you can just demand players upgrade their rigs? Meanwhile, indie devs are over here practicing actual computer science.

The perfect encapsulation of game developer paranoia! When someone asks about their game's progress, they immediately assume the person has heard some terrible news. That nervous smile says it all - "My game is totally fine and definitely not a buggy mess held together by duct tape and prayers! Why? Did GitHub leak my commit messages about the physics engine being 'temporarily' disabled since 2021?" This is the digital equivalent of responding to "How are you?" with "Why? What have people been saying about me?!"

The first thing I do after buying a new game is hunt down these four apocalyptic horsemen and banish them to the shadow realm. Nothing says "I want my game to look like actual gameplay and not a pretentious indie film" like turning off every post-processing effect that makes my GPU cry. Game devs think we want our screens to look like we're playing through a vaseline-smeared kaleidoscope while having a migraine. My RTX 3080 didn't die for this.

The ultimate graphics card rebellion! This stick figure dictator has had enough of hyper-realistic ray-traced games where you can count individual arm hairs in 8K resolution. It's the perfect satire of how we've gone from "graphics don't matter, gameplay does!" to spending $3000 on GPUs just to see realistic water physics that we'll ignore after 5 minutes. The punishment? Back to text adventures and visual novels where your imagination has to do the heavy lifting. No DLSS or frame rate counters—just pure YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE energy. Somewhere, a hardcore Dwarf Fortress player is nodding in approval.

The indie game dev lifecycle in a nutshell: Five glorious years of success followed by eternal obscurity. Just like Herman Melville who went from celebrated author to "who?" faster than you can say "white whale." Your first game is Flappy Bird , your second is Flappy Bird: The Sequel Nobody Asked For . The Wikipedia timeline of your career will be equally savage—a brief moment of glory followed by the crushing section heading: "2023-2028: Unsuccessful developer who now works at Starbucks."

Oh. My. GOD. The absolute AUDACITY of solo game developers! 💅 One minute they're drowning in a sea of basic coding errors that a toddler could fix, and the next they're strutting around telling friends they're "professional game developers." THE DUALITY! It's like wearing a designer outfit while your apartment is literally on fire. The confidence! The delusion! The sheer DRAMA of pretending you know what you're doing when your code is held together with digital duct tape and prayers! And yet, we stan a delusional king/queen. Because honestly, without that unhinged optimism, would ANY indie games ever get finished? I think NOT.