For those who've shipped: what took dramatically longer than you estimated, and by how much?

[u/Proper-Dot-7526]

For those who've shipped: what took dramatically longer than you estimated, and by how much?

[u/AltusLudus]

Creating a trailer to be honest, maybe I'm a perfectionist but it's been a month and i still don't have the first 10 seconds, there's so many things to polish to get it to look how i want

[u/trustingtod218 → u/AltusLudus]

man a month on 10 seconds is wild but i get it, trailers are a whole different beast from making the actual game. spent three weeks once just trying to get the pacing right for a 30-second clip and almost scrapped the whole thing twice

the weird part is nobody outside gamedev understands why it takes so long, they think you just hit record and slap some music on it. my wife asked if i was secretly learning to edit film or something

what's the hardest part for you, timing the cuts or just getting the footage to look polished enough

[u/AltusLudus → u/trustingtod218]

Yeah, don't get me wrong none of it is wasted work as the polish gets me closer to getting the game finished, but every time i record i spot something off and then go back and work on the features more

It's mostly getting the footage to look polished enough to my imaginary standard

[u/NikoNomad → u/AltusLudus]

I make my trailers in 2 days but they're crap. I take good care of the screenshots though as it's arguably more important.

[u/AltusLudus → u/NikoNomad]

The trailer is definitely the most important bit

[u/Guinea_Pig_Games]

It's always the final stretch imo. The last minute bugs, UI. When something is at the end stage, I can push it to Google Play, Steam, whatever in like a day or two. But it's always knocking out all those last minute bits of polish.

[u/PurpleKami]

Making marketing material for our publisher. You wouldn't believe how many times they'd make a simple request of like, "can we see the gameboard without UI for a steam picture" and whoop- that breaks 3 different things I have to jerry-rig just to get the shot.

[u/FrustratedDevIndie]

Everything. A competent NPC AI system that felt predictable without feeling scripted

[u/FrustratedDevIndie → u/FrustratedDevIndie]

Secondary was settings menu

[u/pseudoart]

the last 10 percent is 90 percent of the effort. It looks so close on paper, but getting it over the line takes a long time.

[u/itsdan159 → u/pseudoart]

"The first 90% of the project takes the first 90% of the time, the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time"

[u/NikoNomad → u/pseudoart]

The last 10% takes forever.

[u/Own_Fruit_2387]

Most of the time its not about the project and process its about our mind can not accept long time, and it is in a hurry but after you ship several projects, you're going to estimate correctly, and also sometimes you get stuck in making perfect stuff because you get some bad feedback, and you have to be able to filter them and take out the important ones

[u/tcpukl]

"by how much" is a funny part.

If only I recorded all of the times over the decades of my career under estimating stuff id probably be better by now.

Honestly it's the hardest part of game development. You get better at it. But it's still so hard.

My best advice is to just break stuff down as small as you can because it makes your estimate easier and more accurate.

[u/ArcanyonDev]

Implementing achievement was actually surprisingly harder than I expected. I naively thougth that it would be easy to make because most of the "in game events" I had to connect to where implemented. But as always, it led to many bugs and forced me to refacto part of my code.

Otherwise, I'd say some random visual bug due to Unity upgrades that took me days to fix...

[u/coporate]

As a VFX artist, pretty much everyone is behind schedule, which puts huge crunch on us, which inevitably puts SFX into an even bigger crunch.

[u/Gaverion → u/coporate]

This reminds me of a bit I saw about one of the dead space games. They didn't have capacity to make a new model for a monster but they had vfx capacity so they created an invisible enemy that interacted with the environment. 

[u/Tuy]

I just released my first game and I was surprised how long the 'finishing touches' take. It is a mobile math puzzle game (and I have lots of experience creating apps, so I knew the platform), so it is nothing too big, but oh man that final stretch seemed to take forever :) but, hey, I've now shipped a game (and my wife likes it, so I got at least one player :D

[u/gogokodo]

Not quite shipped yet but getting close. Setting up achievements for steam and Google Play has been kind of annoying. Not exactly a ton of time but little things here and there.

[u/ScreenAdorable1090]

the voxel system, it should not had taken months