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....
GiphyWas 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...
GiphyInterfacing 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!
GiphyLack 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....
GiphyAfter 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
The people who love you the most can break your heart because of their betrayal of trust.
Cheating is cowardly and inexcusable, but depending on the situation and the couple, it is possible for them to find a path to healing emotional wounds.
But there are some ways in which infidelity is totally unforgivable.
That's the kind of scenario Redditor WCh3L3 was curious to hear about when they asked:
"What’s the wildest cheating story you’ve witnessed or happened to you?"
It must be exhausting leading double lives.
Hospital News
"A friend of a friend found out that her husband was cheating when she got to the hospital to see her husband who had just moments before been brought in by ambulance after a serious car accident only to be denied entry to his room because 'his wife was already in the room with him.'"
"He had two simultaneous lives with two women, neither of which was aware of the other."
– JeBronlLames
The Ruse
"My ex-wife pretended to be admitted to a mental health ward for long term treatment while actually staying with her new man and cheating on me."
– Impossible-Visit-199
"This one is just next level."
– most-royal-chemist
"That’s some Batman villain level of intrigue and machination. His wife missed her calling and wasted her abilities on sleeping around."
– filifijonka
A Separate Life
"My friend's mom was in a relationship with a guy for years and they ended up getting engaged and due to marry."
"The guy was a senior director of a company for which he travelled every week abroad for business."
"Eventually, the guy had a heart attack and when my friends mom turned up at the hospital, his wife and 2 kids were there also."
"Turned out he was already married with children and living a double life the whole time. When he went 'abroad' for business, he was simply going back to his actual family."
– wallbagz
Here's The Story
"My dad did this. He worked nights and would juggle both families that way."
"He came clean after he got admitted to hospital for heart trouble and realised that if things went badly he’d end up in this exact situation."
"I was 16 when he came clean that I have an older brother and sister. They found out about me then too - as did his wife."
"ETA: I’d actually already figured it out before he told me though. Nobody else had."
"EATA: I saw a preview of a text on my dad’s phone from my sister. I didn’t know she was my sister obviously, but it said ‘hi dad, mum says…’"
"At first I was in denial and I thought his friend must have borrowed his phone or something. I started to watch him more closely."
"He had a ringtone (lol the 00’s) that would say the name of the caller. I noticed whenever a certain name rang he’d leave the room. Some tactical eavesdropping later and 15 year old me had it figured out that I had a brother and sister."
"I didn’t clock I had a stepmother though, or that I was family no2 and they were his primary family. But I still think I did pretty well!"
"My whole family on my mum’s side knew - mum respected that it was my dad’s secret to tell and she gave him time to tell it. (Although they did have a few arguments about it as I was growing up, I never knew what they were about at the time.)"
– notemily-
Life is never the same once the truth comes out.
Shameless
"A family friend's husband was having an affair for 20+ years and that woman knew the entire time about his family. He was at her ranch one time and was bucked off a horse and broke his back. The affair partner called his wife to tell her and acted like everything about this situation was normal and the wife had no reason to act all upset at the affair. Some people really just have no shame."
"Guy lived and made a complete recovery, left his mistress and they stayed together since they were working on their relationship. He died a few years ago and the wife finds out he never actually left his mistress just lied."
– SailoLee92
Unilateral Decision
"In a small town the husband kept telling people he had an open marriage; finally someone asked his wife about it, she was unaware of this new arrangement."
– Long_Strange_Trip_GD
Rehab Romance
"Was in rehab, two people were there for sex addiction one a minister the other a Jewish housewife. They left rehab together early. Woman divorced her husband who sent her to rehab for sex addiction and married the guy she met in rehab. They are still married 10 years later and seem very happy."
– Life-Evidence-6672
On The Case
"I knew a guy years ago that was a private investigator. Many times he was approached by a spouse who suspected their partner was cheating."
"He had a slam-dunk strategy. He would suggest his client sign up for a course, whether a hobby thing, or educational. The key was that the class would happen for a period of weeks, all on the same day of the week, and all at the same time of day."
"Then, while his client was in class, he would follow the spouse."
"Caught them every time."
– PJMurphy
If you have a hunch about an unfaithful significant other, it's there for a reason.
Going For A Run
"Had a coworker who cheated on her live-in boyfriend. She would tell him she was going for a run, put on her shorts without underwear and would f'k her side piece in the apartment parking lot. So then she would come back inside sweaty 30 mins later and needed to shower and it all made sense to her boyfriend, he never questioned it. She was an awful human."
– rashawah
It Made Scents
"A friend caught her husband cheating because he kept coming home smelling like ferrets."
"Hard to play off 'long day at work' and explain that."
"When she found out at a holiday party that one of the young female coworkers owned ferrets, it all made sense."
– benloe7
Special Delivery
"I used to go to a comic shop. And the comic shop owner knew all of the gossip in the area. Nice dude. Remembers all of his regulars and asks about you if he hasn’t seen you in awhile to check in on people. Lot of people in the area grew up with his shop. So he’s got stories."
"Anyways he told us about this story from some years back about this regular. Who disappeared for a few months. Comes back one day. And the shop owner asks him, 'hey, man. Haven’t seen you in awhile?' Kind of like where have you been. The regular was like oh I’ve been getting divorced. I had to move it was a whole thing."
"So naturally the shop owner asks. 'Why are you divorcing your wife?' The regular caught his wife cheating."
"He had picked up a 2nd part time job as pizza delivery man because he was trying to fund to take his wife on her dream vacation. All of the money he earned from that job was supposed to go into that vacation. He had been working this job for like 6 months. It was a whole secret. She didn’t know he was doing that for her. Because he was trying to surprise her."
"He was the pizza delivery man at the motel. She was cheating at him with. The dude she was cheating on him with answered the door with her right next to him."
"He apparently didn’t even go back to the pizza place. He quit on the spot. Went home. Packed his sh*t and left town."
– TheMysticalPlatypus
Those who are unfaithful in their relationships may think they're good enough for more than one person, but they're usually not.
And while you may not believe in it, there's something called karma, and watching it enact justice can be extremely gratifying.
If you were the one being cheated on, know that the person with whom you've fallen in love is not the kind of person you want to spend the rest of your life with and there will always be a better human who will respect you and love you.
And if you were the cheater, watch your back. Because whether you believe in it or not, karma's coming for ya.
Food trends are not so very different from fashion trends, constantly evolving and quickly becoming outdated or passé.
Can you think of the last time you were served ambrosia at a dinner party?
Or have you noticed how anything featuring kale is now met with an eye roll rather than excitement?
Of course, some food trends tend to last longer than others.
Even if many people wish that they would also become extinct... the sooner the better!
Redditor Prestigious-Humor872 was eager to hear all the food trends people wished would die out, and fast, leading them to ask:
"What modern food trend can you not wait to die?"
Less Isn't Always More...
"2 ingredient desserts (with 7 'optional' ingredients that appear once you read the actual recipe)."- strawberry-emma
You Pay For The Experience
"Food trucks that charge the same price as a premium restaurant but serve half the size on a floppy plate that I have to stand up to eat."- thorn_10
"Food trucks."
"Weren’t they supposed to serve cheaper food because of lower overhead?"
"No brick and mortar?"
"We have a lobster roll truck-pulled by a Range Rover- that shows up for lunch and charges $22 for one entree."
"Ridiculous."- tizzymyers·
GiphyChoice Of Words...
"Calling a slight alteration to a recipe a 'hack'."
"Adding parmesan cheese to your grilled cheese sandwich is not a 'hack'."
"It's a minor recipe change."- No_Pear_2326
Jumping The Gun A Bit...
"If I'm on a website I'm only there to look at your menu."
"I'm not interested in starting an order before I've looked at the menu."
"No, I don't want to give you my zip code."
"Just give me your menu and some food pictures."- DueRest
Staying Humble?
"Fancy restaurants that say they serve 'street tacos' and proceed to charge $18 for three."- Chipwich75
T-Bell Yes GIF by Taco BellGiphyThere's A Reason We're Told Not To Play With Our Food...
"The stupid food wasting trends on YouTube and TikTok etc."- fluffernuttersndwch
Presentation Is Key...
"For some reason putting food in wine glasses."- Ralphroberts603
"Restaurants serving food on cutting boards, shovels, paper, shells, or anything that is not an actual plate."- Funny_Disaster1002
meat grill GIF by Gifs LabGiphyRemember The Golden Arches And The Red Roofs?
"Making all fast food buildings look like cookie-cutter beige/grey boxes."
"They all used to have their own distinct personalities."- mattnotis
There's Economizing, And Then There's Jusy Poor Hygeine...
"The videos of people making food in sinks."
"Gross."- h20rabbit
Is It Even Still A Secret After 100 Thousand Views?
"Any TikTok/IG trend that makes life more difficult for fast-food workers with overly complex orders or ordering stuff not on the menu or trying to 'one up' each others orders etc."- HiThisIsMichael
bored fast food GIF by Zaxby'sGiphyMaybe It Gives Them Incentive?
"Tipping as an option BEFORE receiving good service."- mytimeis2044
Sweet Tooth? Or Cavity Express?
"Sweets on top of sweets."
"A milkshake with a donut, lollipop, and cupcake attached."- Marleygem
Technology Slowly Taking Our Jobs...
"I just went to a restaurant, not a fast food place, a sit-down restaurant where you have to scan the QR code for the menu, then a screen pops up where you have to place your own order."
"No one comes to the table to answer questions, nothing."
"You place your order, a person comes by and throws your drinks at you. "
"Then they swing by a while later and throw your food at you."
"That’s all you see of them."
"You pay your bill on your phone, and are still expected to tip."- Megmuffin102
Saint Urbain Website GIF by Front of HouseGiphyBe it in presentation, cooking style, or flavor profile, people will likely always try to make food "cool" in truly bizarre ways.
Sometimes ignoring that the only thing that should truly matter is whether or not it tastes good.
At least people have finally realized that kale doesn't need to be added to everything!
For now, at least...