I've always loved the polish phase of game development.
Adding game feel can completely transform a game. After weeks (or even months) spent building gameplay systems, it's often the moment where everything finally starts feeling alive. The downside : probably the most time-consuming parts of development, at a stage I’m already exhausted… Jumping through your codebase, writing countless one-off animation scripts, camera effects, and little feedback systems. OMG…
And to achieve the picture, have you ever, like me, spent hours adding juice to a game after weeks of coding, only to discover that... it just still s**k ?
No way I could continue this way, so I changed my workflow. Instead of treating game feel as the final polish pass, I started adding it during the prototyping phase. But as juicing up requires so much effort, I ended up building a small animation tool for myself that lets me iterate extremely quickly.
The result ? I can discard weak prototypes much earlier. I can focus on the mechanics that actually have potential. AND, I finally stay motivated throughout development because the game already feels satisfying from the very beginning.
Looking back, it's probably had a bigger impact on my development process than almost any other tool I've made so far.
How do you approach this phase and how do you manage to keep motivated on the long run ?