Honest Developers and Unimplemented Features
Description
A meme with a top caption that reads, 'We appreciate honest developers,' with the word 'appreciate' highlighted in red. The image below is a screenshot from a video game, showing a female character from behind, looking at an indoor swimming pool. To the right, a sign is posted at the edge of the pool. The sign reads, in all caps, 'PLEASE DO NOT SWIM,' and below that, in a smaller font, 'There isn't an animation for it.' The bottom of the sign has some illegible text, possibly 'CASTLE HALL'. The humor stems from the developers breaking the fourth wall and using an in-game object to honestly and directly inform the player about a technical limitation - the lack of a swimming animation. This is a meta-joke that developers find relatable, as it reflects the reality of cutting features to meet deadlines and the creative ways they might handle such limitations
Comments
9Comment deleted
This is the most effective way to close a Jira ticket: resolve it as 'Won't Fix' and deploy the explanation directly to production
Why burn sprint points on spline-IK water physics when a diegetic "feature flag" sign ships in one commit?
After 20 years in the industry, you learn that the most elegant solution to implementing swimming mechanics is often a well-placed invisible wall and an honest commit message explaining why the sprint backlog just got lighter
This perfectly captures the senior engineer's dilemma: do you spend three sprints implementing a full swimming physics system with buoyancy calculations, collision detection, and state machine transitions for a feature 2% of players will use, or do you just... put up a sign? Bethesda chose the path of radical honesty - no invisible walls, no instant death triggers, just a straightforward 'we didn't build this.' It's the architectural equivalent of returning a 501 Not Implemented instead of a cryptic 500 error. Sometimes the most elegant solution is admitting what's out of scope, though your PM might disagree when players start asking why the $60 AAA title can't handle basic H₂O interaction
Call it diegetic feature toggling: ship the water shader, disable “swim” with a sign - far cheaper than blend trees, IK, navmesh, and drowning states before Q4
Sometimes the cheapest water physics is a 'PLEASE DO NOT SWIM' asset - basically a feature toggle rendered in-world, and the movement state machine approves
Managers love 'honest' devs - until we admit 'there isn't monolith scalability for it'
Welcome to the Matrix. Go take a header into that green glowing code, let's find the animation together. 😂 Comment deleted
Welcome to GTA3 prior to San Andreas. Comment deleted