Developing software and the creation of technology is a world I know nothing about... Thank the Lord. It seems to be fraught with pitfalls and repetitive problems. All that coding could drive anybody bonkers. Building new games for the masses is seems especially life consuming. Developers run on lack of sleep, patience and sanity most of the times. Maybe we should kept it all simple with Super Mario Brothers.
Redditor u/Dannycopo wanted to hear from developers out there by posing the question.... Game developers of reddit, what is the worst experience you've had while making a game?
Watch the Morale....
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Was told by boss that we are supposed to create an online simulation game with integrated educational material to gain score/points so that users can learn about various financial concepts while playing the game. I was excited but after tons of modifications requests, it turned out to be video player combined with couple of drag and drop MCQs resulting in automated assets unlock animations giving user no control of simulation.
About to submit this in couple of weeks with a pissed morale. PrizeGoal
SO many issues...
Less than 12 hours after the launch of our MMO, it became apparent that we had a problem. Characters skipping so fast it looked like short distance teleporting, characters being hit and taking damage while no enemies appeared to be around, and a bunch of other really strange desync issues. None of our testers were able to reproduce this, but we could all see it happening on the live servers.
We had most of the programming team trying to track this down, working 24/7 on all sorts of theories including networking, cheats, logic errors, bandwidth issues.
I found this maybe 24 hours into the search. Turned out one of the oldest and most fundamental parts of our game engine used floating point for time - the time that was propagated to the entire game. This had worked splendidly during dev and testing, because we never kept a single game session going for long enough to accumulate floating point errors.
Had the dev originally creating this part change it to integer-based time, pushed out a tiny update, and then we all went home to sleep for 12 hours. einie
The Delete....
After about 2 months working on a project, my boss comes over and says she needs to move my shared virtual drive to another location. She said she would use a Unix terminal to perform this risky task. I watched her type the wrong command and before I could say anything it was done. She started whispering to herself, oh no... oh nononono... I have... deleted your drive. I'm so sorry... She had indeed deleted my entire drive instead of moving it.
No version control, no backups, no getting it back, just gone. She said I could take the rest of the day off and start rewriting it all tomorrow, it wouldn't take me that long! How kind! 2 months of work! I went home filled with rage and thought of never coming back. The next day however I went there and started rewriting everything. It wasn't actually that bad, it only took about 10 days and everything was much cleaner the second time. A mental exercise I recommend to every developer out there :)
Edit: She was a great boss and a very very smart person, she just made a really bad mistake that day.
Edit2: This was in 2009, no need to message me with your sick git setup, I'm fine now. salmonado
Can't Commit....
Worst experience I've had that concerns making games is getting started with a team of remote members who all eventually stop working on the project. No commitment, basically. Delphizeta
Exhausting Efforts...
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Interfacing with external hardware. You can't do it in an emulator. So compile the game, put it on a medium, boot up the console, click through all menus, start game, see if it works. It doesn't.
Try again a hundred times more constantly tweaking your code to see if it works. Yes, it works, after an exhausting week of compiling and booting. HotLanguage
Too Much Memory...
Many many years ago I wrote a game for the Commodore Pet. A dungeon crawler type game. The pet had a cassette as this was pre-floppy days.
I had to heavily optimize the memory usage to fit the game into memory and finished the game with 0 bytes left. Saved it.
Apparently it took more memory to load than to save because i could never load the game again. Backups and print out were not a thing yet so lost forever. It was the best game I had written ever. PunkRockDude
Break the Code...
Being too lazy to comment my own code on long-term projects. My coding style has changed quite significantly in the last 2 years I've been working on a mobile game. Having to go back and digging through old code is just not fun. ExtremelyActive
The Old College Try...
Community college: was in a class where we had to work on two games concurrently, one group and one individual, because that sounds like a recipe for success. Group slacks so much that the night before both projects were due I just had to say "screw it" and had to finish all the programming of the game with placeholder assets. I was hardly behind on my work but was waiting on their work to finish things up. Got done at some point in the morning and proceeded to finish my individual project because I was an idiot and slacked on that one (totally my fault).
Got done with both projects at 7am, turned them in at 8am. Got 100% on both because my community college had low standards. pi_memorizer
The Clues...
Worked with GameMaker 8.1. (Free version)
Spend ~1 hour typing off code from YouTube tutorials on certain things -> GM tells me that some piece of code I typed is only available in paid version.
The worst thing is that didn't happen once, but more often than not when I tried to learn new code. Especially since I was still learning and had no clue how to do it otherwise, this was frustrating as hell. SwagWaschbaer
Over it!
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Lack of patience with myself, leading to game abandonment and forgetting about it until a Reddit thread 15 years later. DemonKyoto
Naturally....
Natural Artificial Behavior for NPCs and Enemies
It took me nearly six months to stop having AI follow scripting protocol and instead react based on the environment and not what x says to do.
Every night was miserable, lying awake in bed and thinking about why it wasn't working. But now that I have finally finished it, I'm basically 99% done.
Four years of development in, solo and about 155GB later... I can finally start doing music. Soulbrandt-Regis
The Unfortunate Transfer!
It was a project for school, so I don't know if it counts, but I was working with Unity for the first time and my dumb butt decided to transfer files. Half of the game broke, it was 2 a.m. and I had to do a presentation of it in the morning. Garciall
The Revert!
I did a minor for my school in co-operation with two other schools where we were making a game for the Dutch Police Academy that would make it easier and cheaper for them to train the officers with. We were making the game in Unity with 4 developers and 4 artists. Well, one of the artists never pulled changes from the unity project (for those who don't know, unity offers (or offered, haven't used it in a long time) a build in git feature we used). So when he wanted to commit his changes, we were set back like 4 weeks of progress because it overwrote everything, and we couldn't figure out how to revert it back. We could go back to a previous version, but we couldn't revert his push.
We salvaged it somewhat by going back and getting the important scripts and pasting it in the new, wrecked version, but considering the next day was the end of a sprint and we were to show what we had, we weren't happy, and we already didn't really like that artist. maestroke
Take a Break. Refocus.
Having great ideas, putting it together and spending around 8 hours making an intro cut scene only to find the character won't turn the right way. Getting pissed that they won't listen, trying to fix it, fixing it and then seeing the fix messed up the rest of the cut scene. I ended up taking a long break, working on it for a bit then giving up. Radthereptile
Losing the Idea....
The worst experiences were early on where I didn't have enough experience to finish a concept and then abandoned it. The modern trend of smaller initial games as a way of learning is the right way to go. various15
'F' the critics!
Worst part for us was dealing with people on steam purchasing the game because it was cheap and then leaving negative comments because it wasn't a triple a title level of polish. oneofus1
Fix the Script....
Making a simple spell system for an MMO. A guy absolutely insisted against all odds that a certain aspect of a subtype of spells (particle collision with -bolt abilities) be done entirely through a script -- his unedited script. It was an absolute mess. It was so bad that I struggled to break 90 FPS basic when those abilities were cast, and had to optimize a dozen fairly complex scripts (he definitely made some of them), just to hold 90+ with this script active, because it was alone was generating spikes of 30+ FPS loss.
How bad was the script? I'm talking massive update calls on high particle counts. Re-caching other abilities 100+ times a second (why!?). Particle waves checking for every collision possible (including for other abilities from the same source, which can't even be cast simultaneously) when the physics settings prevents most of those collisions from even happening. Carefully lined up color progression via Update.... to match up with the particle system's color over time component.................
I'm pretty sure he was actually competent and just trying to make my life a living hell. boblikeslettuce
Be Specific!
I was working with a game that had some very and i mean VERY specific functions, I worked on the functions for about 3 weeks before i realized that half the functions i had programmed were already in the game engine i was using. I was mad at myself but happy at the same time. Mighty_V
Burned Out!
I'm still a student, but one time in my second semester I was super far behind on all my projects because I had 7 classes that semester and every one of them had a huge assignment, all assigned in the same week and due in the same week. We did not get much time to work on these projects. For one of them I thought if I stayed up and never stopped working I could check all the requirements in a day and then hand in something kinda trash, but still acceptable. I stayed up for 40 hours straight and I couldn't even get the core mechanic of my game to work. It probably would have helped if I took a nap at some point. Or even just a break for anything longer than using the bathroom or waiting in line for food at the cafeteria (before heading right back upstairs to work while I ate). I was definitely burnt out before I even started and that kind of exhaustion only made it worse. livipup
It all worked out....
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After a week of working 16 hour days to push out content for a big demonstration for the company owners, they decided that they hated everything we'd spent two years doing and wanted almost of it redone.
It was portrayed as being all our fault even though they'd offered very little guidance as to what they wanted beyond vague generalizations (lots of player choice! hard sci-fi!). It also didn't help that they wanted a tremendous amount of work done very quickly by a too small team, and they wanted it all done impeccably.
I was let go shortly after, with the rest of my team following shortly after. I was devastated at the time, but can recognize now that I kind of dodged a bullet not working for them anymore. StewtredOfBebbanburg
For many childhood memories are overrun by living nightmares.
Yes, children are resilient, but that doesn't mean that the things we see as babes don't follow us forever.
The horrors of the world are no stranger to the young.
Redditor -2sweetcaramel- wanted to see who was willing to share about the worst things we've seen as kids, so they asked:
"What’s the creepiest thing you saw as a kid?"
Serious Danger
"Me and my best friend would explore the drainage tunnels under the Vegas area where we grew up. These were miles long and it was always really cool down there so it was a good way to escape the heat of our scorching hot summers. We went into this one that goes under the Fiesta casino and found a camp with a bunch of homeless people."
"Mind you we are like 11 years old lol. And we just kept going like it was nothing. It wasn’t scary then but when I look back at it we could have been in some serious danger. Our parents had no idea we did this or where we were and we had no cellphones. We could have been kidnapped and never have been found."
oofboof2020
Waiting for Food
"I was at a portillos once when I was 12 and I was waiting with my little brother at a booth while my parents got our food. This guy was standing with his tray kind of watching me then after a couple of minutes he started to walk over really fast not breaking eye contact with me."
"He was 2 feet from the table and my dad came out of nowhere and scared the s**t out of him. He looked so surprised and just said he wanted to see if I’d get scared or not. He left his tray full of food near the door and left. My folks reported him but we never went to that location again since we found a better one closer to home."
nowhereboy1964
Captain Hobo to the Rescue
"When I was a pretty young teen, my friends and I were horsing around in San Francisco and started hanging out to smoke with some homeless guys. Another homeless dude came up and began aggressively trying to shake us down for anything (money, smokes, a ride, drugs- all of it) and wouldn’t take no for an answer."
"We got in over our heads and could tell this guy was now riling the other 2 guys up and they were acting like they wanted to jump us. Some grandfather-looking old homeless man appeared out of nowhere and yelled at us to get the f**k out of here- nice kids like us don’t belong down here at this hour!!"
"Captain Hobo saved our lives that night. My parents sincerely thought we were at a mall all day lol."
FartAttack911
Survival
tsunami GIF
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"I was 7 and survived the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. Witnessed the wave rise way above the already massive palm trees (approx. 40ft?) and my family and I watched/heard the wave crash into the ground from a rooftop."
faithfulpoo
These Tsunami stories are just tragic.
On the Sand
Scared The Launch GIF by CTV
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"We were a group of kids who went to swim in a local lake. And there was a dead body on the beach with their hands raised and their legs bent unnaturally that local police just took out of the same lake. I've never put my foot in these waters again."
oyloff
Be Clever
"I was walking to school and I was about 5 or 6 years old and some guy pulled up beside me in his car and asked if I would get in. He also offered me sweets to do so. I said no. The creepy bit was when he calmly said ‘clever boy’ to me, then drove off. I’ve never even told my parents or anyone else about this as it would most likely freak them out."
OstneyPiz
Bad Jokes
"Dad's side of the family pranked me by burying a fake body on our back property and had me dig it up to find valuables. Was only allowed to use a lantern for light. They stuffed old clothes with chicken bones. Sheetrock mud where the head was... Random fake jewelry as the treasures... I was like maybe 10 or 11.. I remember digging up the boot first and started gagging because it became real at that point."
Alegan239
YOU
Who Are You Reaction GIF by MOODMAN
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"Woke up to find my little brother staring at me in the dark, asking, Are you really you?"
PrettyLola2004
Siblings can really be a bunch of creepers.
No one should talk to others in the dark though.
Not all pet owners have the same relationship with their pets.
While anyone who decides to become a pet owner, or pet parent as some say, love their pets equally, some never ever let them leave their side.
Taking their pet with them to work, running errands, even on vacations.
Many pet parents even allow their pets to share their bed with them when going to sleep.
For others though, this is where a line is finally drawn.
Redditor Piggythelavasurfer was curious to hear whether pet owners allowed their pets to share their bed with them, as well as the reasons why they do/don't, leading them to ask:
"Do you let your pet sleep in your bed? Why/why not?"
The Tiny Issue Of Water...
"Absolutely not."
"I have fish."- Senior-Meal3649
Everyone Gets Lonely Eventually...
"I adopted an eleven year old cat the day before Halloween."
"She has mostly lived in my closet since I got her, and she hasn’t been too interested in coming out."
"Last night, she came out of my closet and jumped up on my bed, and crawled under my covers and curled up by my feet to sleep."
"I was so happy!"- YellowBeastJeep
The Comforting Reminder That You're Not Alone...
"I recently lost my Greyhound but I used to let him sleep on my bed with me."
"The company was nice and he was no trouble to have on my bed."- HoodedMenace3
Hungry Cookie GIF by De Graafschap Dierenartsen
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What Do You Mean Allow?
"I have no choice."
"She is a cat, cats do whatever they want."- Small_cat1412
"He lets me sleep in my bed."- Poorly-Drawn-Beagle
Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way
"I carry my old boy upstairs to bed every night."- worst_in_show
Hug GIF by The BarkPost
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Who Needs An Alarm Clock?
"I let my two cats sleep with me."
"They're so full of love and just want cuddles all the time."
"And so do I."
"We've all developed a lil routine."
"Get to bed, oldest sleeps on my feet to keep them warm, youngest lies in my arm while I lie on my side (she the little spoon), then when I snooze my alarm for work in the morning the youngest paws at my face and meeps loudly to wake me up."- GhostofaFlea_
Whose Bed Is It Anyway?
"Yes."
"They're also kind enough to let me squeeze into whatever space they've left for me."
"Although I do get a few dirty looks off them."- Therealkaylor
"I found this tiny kitten screaming her head off under a car."
"Would not come out."
"Got some food and some water in dishes."
"I stood by the tire so she couldn't see my feet."
"She got curious about the food and water and started gobbling it down."
"I thought she would bolt when I squatted down."
"She was too busy eating."
"I grabbed her by the nape of the neck and all four legs went straight out and she tried to scratch me to death."
"I got her in the door and tossed her toward the couch."
"She ricocheted off the couch as if she was a ping pong off a table and I lost sight of her."
"I put out food and water and a sandbox and did not see that kitten for three days."
"On the third day, I came home and she was on my bed pillow."
"I thought she would bolt when I came near, but she didn't."
"I wanted to sleep so I tried to scoot her little butt off my pillow."
"She would not go."
"I put my head down to sleep and that is the way it was from then on."
"She ran the roost."- Logical_Cherry_7588
sleepy kitten GIF
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Sleeping Is A Prerequisite...
"No, he's a cat and he cannot keep still during the night."
"He walks across the headboard, opens the closet doors, jumps into the windows and rustles the blinds, etc."
"If he would sleep he could stay, but alas, he's a ramblin' man."- Spong_Durnflungle
Saying No Just Isn't An Option...
"'Let'."
"Lol."
"It's a cat's world and I'm happy to be on her good side."- milaren
Felines Only!
"The cat does, the dog doesn't and the horse certainly does not either."- Xcrowzz
Angry Tom And Jerry GIF by Boomerang Official
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Is That My Hair On That Pillow?
"My dog is perfect."
"She comes up, cuddles til we start to fall asleep, then gets down to sleep on her bed so she doesn't get too hot."
"Jumps back up in the early morning for wake up cuddles."
"The hair everywhere is the only downside but she is so cozy, what can you do."- HoodieWinchester
It is easy to understand how some people are able to fall asleep more easily knowing their friend and protector is there, in bed, with them.
Though we can't blame others who don't want to run the risk of being scratched or bitten in the middle of the night either...