Which part of your game development takes the longest?

[BQubed]

I am very much an amateur dev. Save for my experience working Q&A and writing for different games, I have very little experience in making a full fledged game. This lack of experience has sometimes left me disheartened as I watch developers with years of experience also taking many years to make a single game. It leaves me with the thought, "if they've been coding for 10 years and spend 3 years making a video game, then I'll probably take 10 years to make even one game!" That being said, I do understand that games differ greatly in scope and scale which will obviously affect their development period.

So my question, as can be seen in the title, is what part of development takes you the longest? It's a question that's been on my mind for a while and I'd really like to hear the thoughts of developers more experienced than myself.

 

[Rayek]

In my experience it takes relatively little time to get the basic gameplay up and runnin, but the polishing and fine-tuning parts can take forever. The other day I created a fun game prototype with dummy assets and a level in a short afternoon and a few hours after dinner, but I know it would take me months to turn it into a releasable presentable public version with good graphics, solid levels, and putting a GUI on it with a nice back story.

 

[vdweller]

The last 5% of a game takes as much time as the 95% that came before

 

[BQubed]

So in your experience, it's not the actual coding that takes the most time, but rather content creation, graphics, and

The last 5% of a game takes as much time as the 95% that came before

I've actually heard that before.

 

[Fihril Kamal]

It depends on what kind of games is it, I three times created fun completed project for myself and the time I spent most is creating the graphics myself, and since I know what scope of my ability in coding so I limit my game scope to that of my ability, so that coding is not really time consuming. But it's different story when I work for a company commercially, the most time consuming is setting up the game to work on all devices, debugging, and setting up the advertisement to get the income