The Pareto principle, gamedev edition

The Pareto principle simply states that, generally, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. In my experience this is true in a lot of fields, and it can easily be translated to "focus on the right things".

This  principle also applies to game development. For example, in a real-time action RPG like The Dream Crawler, the developer has to make sure that the movement and attacking mechanics (the "20%") are as good as possible. That's what players will do all time pretty much, so if those aspects of the game are not great, chances are players will drop the game very soon, no matter if the "other" 80% of the game is super good.

We can easily say that in an action RPG, 80% of the player enjoyment will come from 20% of the game. I think Diablo did an awesome job with this: as you play that game you can easily tell that most of your enjoyment is coming from slashing enemies and hearing the loot dropping sounds.

But does this really helps game developers? 
Yes it does, in the sense that developers have to always remember that the more energy they put on the "right" 20% of things, the more players will enjoy the game.

Is that all there is to it?
No, and that's why I decided to write down this post. Because even if the "other" 80% is not as important as the "right" 20%, it still has to be implemented, look beautiful, and work seamlessly in the game. Otherwise, once again, player will become sick of your game and drop it off. 

Take my case for example.
I spent a lot of effort on navigation and attack patterns. I obviously want movement and attacking to feel great. Of course I also needed to put _some_ effort in all the other aspects of the game: crafting, upgrading objects, enemy behaviors, etc etc.
Last month I finally reached the point where the game engine has all the functionalities that I need to ship the game: skills, inventory, enemy mutations, whatever... so my brain instinctively thought something like "Hey! we're done! there's nothing left to do".
I got that feeling probably because, after spending a _lot_ of time on what I think is the "right" 20%, my brain didn't wanted to accept the fact that now there's all the other 80% to clean and polish before I can ship a fun game. All this time I assumed that I only needed to focus on the right 20%, and once that was done everything else wouldn't really matter.

This is not the reality in video games.
The reality is that _everything_ matters in your game, and everything needs to be finished if you want to ship your game.

I'll go on a limb and say that:
80% of the fun is given by 20% of the content, the other 80% is given by the other 80% of the content.

This translates to the game developer ending up doing 160% of the work he originally thought to get 100% of player fun. Empirically I would say this is true.

How do I cope with this?
Forget that the pareto principle even exists, but realize that there will be times when you will feel really frustrated because even if you've put a _ton_ of effort in (you thought it was the right 20%), this hasn't translated to actual player fun (yet). Accept this, it's part of being a game developer.
In my case for example, July was practically entirely spent of foundation systems for E.G. skills and object upgrades. Even if no content has actually been put in that leverages these systems. August was instead mostly a month about putting new content in and tweaking design stuff. (E.G. worldgen parameters or adding animation to some entities).
At the end of July I felt really frustrated because I knew that even after all the work I put in for the systems (the "right" 20%) all the content was still missing. (The "other 80%). This could have been easily avoided if I had simply accepted earlier the fact that my foundation systems would have also needed a lot of energy in order to integrate content that uses them.

In conclusion...
Accept that you have to continuously reassess the situation of your game and what things are the "right" 20%. But don't ignore the fact that after you put a lot of energy on the right things, you will _also_ have to put an enormous amount of effort on everything else, if you wanna ship a fun game.

Cheers, and enjoy the build!