Boy, this question hurts.

For anyone above a certain age with kids below a certain age this isn’t a punishment or a challenge, this is A DREAM!! Heroes of might and magic 3, system shock 2, Anno (any version up to 1503), Morrowind, Civilization 3, Age of wonders shadow magic, Baldur’s gate 1 and 2…

Whenever my wife finds the time she goes to her room to play Morrowind. She just got a new laptop and the first thing I did was install OpenMW and copy her save file.

It goes without saying that you couldn’t finish any of those games in those 12 hours, except for System Shock 2.

At my first job I was working on an MMO and we had a DatabaseManager class with 10k+ lines of code. Less than the first 200 lines actually used any of the members of that class.

you’d never have player movement in the GameManager class

You want to bet? (Source: I teach game programming on a college level.)

But yeah, your comment about the gear icon is sadly more true than people may realize. Game developers do questionable things. => Engine developers cater to people. => Students argue that if something is supported it can’t be that bad. Sometimes it feels like fighting windmills.

The real naming fail is calling the class “GameManager”, still my number one pet peeve. With a class name as vague as that you would have to add tons of information into the variable name. (Also the class name begs for unorganized code. I mean name one function or variable that you could not justify putting into the “GameManager” class. After all if it’s managing the game it could justifiably perform any process in the game and access any state in it.)

Once you put the first bool into a class with a name like AccessibilitySettings, calling it something like HighContrast is completely sufficient.

You may enjoy having a look at F#. It says that it’s “functional first”, but I think a better description would be “an opinionated version of C#”.

For example it doesn’t have a “const”-keyword. Instead it has a “mutable”-keyword, because everything is const by default.

Because they are selling the product the customers think they are getting, not the one that they actually get. I guarantee that a device with thumb sticks and lousy performance will sell better than one without sticks and with better performance.

When I start a free trial I immediately set a reminder in Google calendar. And when I am looking for a specific movie I buy it used online. That way I have all my favorite movies on my NAS and can cancel my subscriptions when there is nothing especially interesting.

That’s the thing: progress quest isn’t an idle game. It’s a parody of modern games that was made long before idle games were a thing. It wasn’t fun just like a joke isn’t an interesting story.