Captains log Star date 29/10/2009 Hopefully this topic might spark a bit of interest.... I am writing a report on what can go wrong in the development of a game, If you reading this and have developed a game before, maybe you could give some ideas about the pitfalls that may occur, or even better what experiences you have had during your development of the game or games you have been part of. Heres your opportunity to rant about all the things that plagued you during the development process. The more opinions the more I have to write about, it doesn't have to be detailed any old bad memories will do. thanks for taking the time to read this. Live long and prosper.

Moving to the lounge.

Always take your time for debugging! There is nothing more horrible than finishing app on last time (e.g. 2 days before it's going to be sold/sent) and finding there is just so much bugs that it is just impossible to get it working on time.
When this happened to me on last project I just havent slept for two days before selling it. It was fixed at time (with the help of god and lots of caffeine), but well lets say it simply wasn't cool comin' at business meeting totally exhausted. Just note that it wasn't game project (but it was related to game development), also it is important to note that this is important for every project.

In my second-in-life game project I learned that it is never good to leave more important topics like collision-detection to do them later. Releasing game with lots of collision bugs is just a nightmare (and as long as you won't release patch, the players won't play it ... it simply disturbs that much).
So never say "I will do this later", do it rather NOW and debug, debug, debug... until it is perfect.

Pick your hardware requierments, never develop any project (game or other) without picking target machine. And make it run at at least 30 fps on that machine (not less! ... more is better).

Reading this also might help - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php?print=1

"Feature Creep" (or its other name, "Cool S#$t Syndrome" lol) is a problem. That is where, as the game is being developed, the developers keep thinking of new and awesome features they want to add to the game. These are often not thought out well-enough or considered in the big picture of the design. They all push back release time.

Marketing getting involved in design decisions.
Management getting involved in the development process.

The documentation fails to mention that, in certain circumstances when encoding an audio file, there is padding added at the beginning of the stream.

From my experiences...

#1 It's easy to be ambitious in the beginning and over-work yourself by writing code for 16+ hours a day, several days at a time. If you do that, STOP!! For the sake of your own health and the project. You'll get burn out and you'll have to grind the rest of the way to completion. Creating games are marathons. You gotta pace yourself and not sprint at the first chance you get. (I do this too much)

#2 Before you start writing code, have a complete design. Fixing stuff on paper takes less time than re-engineering code. This is software engineering 101, but I ignore this principle more than I should.

#3 If you're working with other people, communicating is as important as writing code.