Just Make It Exist First

Every aspiring game dev starts with "I'm just gonna make a simple platformer" and somehow ends up planning a massively multiplayer open-world FPS with crafting mechanics, procedural generation, ray-traced graphics, and a blockchain economy. Then reality hits harder than a null pointer exception. The emo Spider-Man sitting in the rain captures that exact moment when you realize your first game won't be the next GTA meets Minecraft meets Cyberpunk. Instead, you'll be lucky if you can get a cube to move without clipping through the floor. The ambition-to-skill ratio is truly unmatched in the gamedev world. Pro tip: Start with Pong. Then maybe Snake. Then we'll talk about your ultrarealistic MMO.

Remember when we thought these janky polygons were the peak of technology? In 2000, we'd sit there amazed at what was essentially a potato with hair clipping through a horse's neck. Now I'm disappointed when my 4K ray-traced game drops below 120fps. The best part? Those old games actually shipped without needing 50GB day-one patches. They just worked... mostly... if you ignored the nightmare fuel character models.

THE AUDACITY of young me declaring "I don't need math, I'll just make video games!" only to later discover that game development is LITERALLY a mathematical hellscape! 😭 Fast forward to the soul-crushing reality where Unity, OpenGL, C++, and every other game dev tool are CACKLING at your mathematical ignorance. They're all just sitting there like "Oh honey, you thought you could escape VECTORS and MATRICES? That's adorable!" Game physics? MATH. Graphics rendering? MATH. Character movement? MATH. It's math all the way down, you poor, delusional child!

You know that crushing moment when you're desperately trying to justify your existence to the people who raised you? Three weeks of debugging, refactoring, optimizing collision detection, and implementing that smooth camera movement system. But when it's demo time, all they see is a character moving left and right for 15 seconds before you hit a game-breaking bug you swore you fixed yesterday. Their polite "It's quite cool" hits different than any code review ever could. They're trying their best to be supportive, but you can see in their eyes they're wondering if you should've become a dentist instead. Meanwhile, you're internally screaming about the 47 classes, 2000 lines of code, and that one Stack Overflow answer that saved your life at 2 AM. The real kicker? If you showed them a polished AAA game, they'd have the same reaction. Non-technical folks just don't understand that those 15 seconds represent your blood, sweat, and approximately 47 cups of coffee.

The great GPU drowning of 2023! While the high-end RTX 5080 and 4090 giraffes stand tall in the deep end smugly claiming "Unreal Engine 5 is working smooth af," all the budget cards are desperately trying to keep their heads above water. That poor RTX 2060 is basically underwater at this point. Nothing quite captures the existential dread of trying to run modern game engines on aging hardware. Epic Games be like "minimum requirements: whatever card was released yesterday." Meanwhile, game devs are nodding sympathetically while secretly adding another particle system that'll bring your GPU to its knees.

The epic showdown nobody expected: Old-school pirate-themed game engines vs. modern anime girl physics engines! Left side shows "THE STRONGEST GAMEDEV IN HISTORY" with a menacing skull pirate that ran smoothly on a Pentium II with 4MB of RAM. Meanwhile, "THE STRONGEST GAMEDEV OF TODAY" features a cute anime character whose hair physics alone requires a NASA supercomputer and makes your GPU beg for mercy. Your RTX 4090 isn't sweating because of ray tracing—it's calculating each individual strand of that anime girl's hair during a gentle breeze.