By far the most common boring common work as a game dev is “waiting for the game or level to finish building”. Build times are probably the greatest time period of lost productivity and boredom among game developers the world over. Be it crunching levels, compiling code, preparing textures, or compressing archives, waiting for builds (and waiting for fixes to build breakages) on any given game has probably eaten at least 10% of the team’s total development time. That is easily collective years across the team lost to waiting for the game to build.
Second to this is probably time spent in meetings that don’t really help very much. Those of you who have worked on a sufficiently large teams likely understand what I mean. Not everyone who is in a meeting always needs to be there, and their time spent in those meetings means less time spent actually doing the work. Figuring out who needs to be in a meeting is a real delicate balance.
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