Just Make It Exist First

Oh honey, the absolute DEVASTATION of Steam Next Fest ending. You went in thinking "I'll just try a few demos" and came out with a wishlist longer than your backlog (which was already embarrassingly long). The sad person with 14,000 wishlists? That's the game developer who just watched their entire life's work get added to the digital equivalent of "I'll get to it eventually" while some other indie game casually strolled away with 300 wishlists and is somehow thriving. The disparity is BRUTAL. Welcome to gamedev, where your masterpiece gets buried under 47 cozy farming simulators and that one game about a sentient piece of bread.

The eternal struggle of the game developer's brain - constantly being seduced by shiny new project ideas while your current project glares at you with betrayal and disappointment. That folder of half-finished Unity projects isn't going to complete itself, but damn if that new roguelike concept doesn't sound more exciting than fixing that collision detection bug you've been stuck on for three days. The project graveyard grows larger with each passing "Wouldn't it be cool if..." thought.

Ah, the classic gaming paradox! You've got hardware that could probably launch a spacecraft to Mars: 128-core CPU, RTX 4090 with 24GB VRAM, 256GB of RAM, and an 8TB NVME SSD that could store the entire Library of Congress. And what does Unreal Engine 5 do with all this computational might? Struggle to hit 25 FPS in a menu screen . It's like buying a Formula 1 car and using it exclusively to pick up groceries at 5mph. Those fancy ray-tracing acronyms (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) are just there to make you feel better about your $5000 investment that's being brought to its knees by some shiny buttons and particle effects. Remember when games used to run at 60 FPS on a potato? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Ah, the beautiful irony of game development priorities. Summoning a lava demon from the depths of hell? "Yeah, we'll just use the particle system and some shaders, no biggie." But adding a simple scarf that doesn't clip through the character model? That's when developers start questioning their career choices. The truth is that seemingly simple features often hide nightmarish complexity. That scarf needs physics, collision detection, and fabric simulation that won't melt your GPU. Meanwhile, the flashy demon just needs to look cool for 5 seconds before disappearing. After 15 years in the industry, I've learned that estimating difficulty based on how impressive something looks is a rookie mistake. The most mundane features will be the ones that break your spirit.

Game engines: either drowning in endless menus or making you frantically jump through hoops to accomplish basic tasks. The comic nails it by sorting them into just two categories - "menus" (looking at you, Unity) or "parkour" (hello, Unreal). Anyone who's tried to find that one specific setting buried in Unity's seventeen nested dropdown menus knows the pain. Meanwhile, Unreal devs are performing mental gymnastics just to implement a simple "Hello World" blueprint. And poor Unity, getting called out for "jumping around a lot" yet still being classified as "menus" - the ultimate burn for an engine trying so hard to be developer-friendly. It's like being told you dance like a spreadsheet.

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!