u/Giant_leaps

A lot of people keep falling for value traps fall and a bias known as "price anchoring" without realizing it. They see a stock crash and think its automatically cheap just because it used to trade way higher.

PayPal is a perfect example. People kept buying it all the way down because they remembered when it traded above 300 dollars. At 200 they said it was undervalued. Then at 150. Then at 100. It just kept falling and falling and people just blindly kept buying thinking they're warren buffet.

The same thing just happened with NVO A lot of people though its safe just because the stock already dropped a lot from the highs. But a lower price doesnt automatically mean lower risk. Expectations were insanely high and when expectations change, stocks can keep falling way longer than people think.

And now some investors might be walking into the same trap with Intuit. People see a decent company and assume every dip is a buying opportunity. Thats exactly how value traps start. If growth slows or the market stops accepting premium valuations, the stock can reprice hard even if the business itself is still good.

The market doesnt care what a stock used to trade for. Sometimes the old price was the mistake. investing is not as simple as stock fall me buy stock me make money when it go back up.

After getting a lot of comments asking for details on how and why i failed i decided to make a separate post on my experience with game development

A lot of people asked me what exactly made me quit game development, so I wanted to explain my background and experience a bit more clearly.

I studied computer science, but I never specialized in game development professionally. Most of what I learned came from self-teaching and experimentation.

Before jumping into 3D games, I spent a long time building small 2D platformer prototypes. Some had mechanics inspired by games like Mario, while others were closer to Hollow Knight. This was all before modern AI tools existed, so most of the learning process was pure trial and error. I built multiple small projects specifically to learn movement systems, combat logic, enemy behavior, animation systems, hitboxes, state machines, and level flow.

Eventually, I managed to recreate most of the mechanics I wanted in 2D and realized something important: I wasn’t actually that interested in making 2D games long term. So I decided to move into 3D.

My original goal was extremely ambitious and stupid: a 3D hack and slash game with 10 dungeons, 10 weapon styles with unique animations, 10 bosses, and around 30 enemy types. After some time, I massively reduced the scope down to a single weapon style and only 10 bosses with no regular enemies essentially just a boss rush game.

Even after cutting the scope that hard, the difficulty increase from 2D to 3D was honestly insane.

The biggest hurdle by far was animation, modeling, and asset creation.

In 2D, workflows are relatively straightforward. You can quickly load sprite sheets, edit frames in Photoshop, reuse animation strips, or buy decent assets that already work out of the box. Even creating your own assets is manageable because you’re dealing with flat images and simple frame transitions.

3D is a completely different monster.

A single 3D character requires modeling, topology cleanup, UV unwrapping, texturing, material setup, skeletal rigging, skin weighting, animation blending, IK systems, retargeting, transition states, root motion handling, physics interactions, collision tuning, and animation state machine management. Every animation also needs proper transitions into other animations or the character immediately looks broken or unnatural. Even small mistakes in rigging or weight painting can completely destroy an animation.

And unlike 2D, where animations are usually isolated, 3D systems are deeply interconnected. Combat, movement, hit detection, animation timing, camera logic, enemy AI, and physics all have to function together seamlessly in real time.

That became my second major hurdle.

Individually, implementing features was not that difficult. I actually built a pretty efficient workflow for coding gameplay systems. The problem was getting multiple systems interacting correctly at once. One small change to combat timing could break animation syncing. Adjusting movement could break hitboxes. Changing animation states could affect enemy reactions. Everything depended on everything else.

Near the end, I actually had a decent amount working:

• A functional player controller
• Movement systems
• Attack animations
• A working hitbox and combat system
• Enemy AI that could react and fight back naturally
• A boss arena prototype

But the entire project relied heavily on placeholder assets, free models from different sources mixed with animation packs from asset bundles. The result looked terrible. Nothing visually matched, the combat felt awkward, and the overall experience felt like an unplayable mess despite the systems technically functioning on a very basic level.

At that point, I decided to try solving the animation problem myself.

I developed a workflow using auto-riggers, motion tracking software, and manual editing. Since I’m fairly athletic, I could physically reproduce most of the combat movements myself for motion reference and cleanup. I eventually managed to reduce animation production time significantly using automation tools and AI-assisted workflows.

But even then, creating a single polished animation with all its variations and transition states could still take several days.

And my game needed well over a hundred animations.

That was the moment reality finally hit me.

After properly planning everything out, I realized I had only two real options:

Either spend thousands of dollars hiring professional artists and animators, or spend years of my life learning and producing everything myself.

At this stage of my life, neither option was realistically possible.

So I decided to cut my losses and walk away from the project.

I don’t regret trying. If anything, the experience gave me a massive amount of respect for professional game developers. People seriously underestimate how difficult modern 3D game development actually is. There’s a reason studios have entire teams dedicated solely to animation, rigging, combat systems, AI, environment art, VFX, technical art, optimization, and gameplay engineering, and even then games still take years to finish.

To everyone still pursuing the dream: I genuinely respect the grind, and I hope your projects succeed.

After spending a huge amount of time trying to build a game solo, I’ve decided to give up and cut my losses.

The biggest reason is exhaustion. Balancing a full-time job alongside a 2hr daily commute leaves me with very little energy. Even when I do have time to work on my project, every part of game development is way too difficult and time-consuming than I thought it would be.

Learning rigging, animation and doing hitboxes alone has been incredibly challenging, even with modern tools that automate a lot of the work. Finding or creating decent assets without relying on generic asset store content or badly textured AI-generated assets is another constant struggle. The game logic and features are an entire bag worms building systems, finding game-breaking bugs that force me to rewrite massive chunks of code over and over again is just soul crushing.

AI coding tools helped speed things up somewhat, but they added they're own problems constant refinement, debugging, and redesigning with every new feature or iteration while ensuring cohesion is extremely annoying. Despite all the hours I invested, I’m nowhere near finished, honestly, I don’t even feel 10% done. The remaining 90% still feels overwhelming, and in many cases I don’t even know how to properly approach it yet.

I massively underestimated how difficult producing a 3D game truly is. There’s a reason real studios have entire teams of devs and still take years to release games.

At this point, continuing would mean sacrificing my health and mental well-being, and going full-time into game development simply isn’t financially possible for me. although i still want to make games i don't feel like the project i'm attempting is feasible solo atleast not rn and i don't want to build games just for the sake of building games i just want to build my game the one i've dreamed about for years but for now i'm tapping out.

So cheers to all my fellow game developers still pushing for their dream, especially those who managed to publish a game I sincerely respect you and I truly wish you all the best!

EDIT: after getting a lot of comments asking about how much progress i made and how and where i failed i decided to do a follow up post to explain everything:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1t9cnea/a_follow_up_on_why_i_quit_game_development_and/