with new game concepts.
Before a milestone and especially a few months before a game is released, the work day will be very intense. The work has a way of very quickly piling up. New features and old bugs suck away all of your time. Working long nights or weekends is not uncommon. Fortunately, employees generally care about the games that they are making, and their passion helps energize them through these occasional long shifts.
The stress can get overwhelming, too. At one company I had a giant stack of bug reports waiting for me on my chair when I came into the office. I would work all day, scrambling to fix the bugs as quickly as possible, working on full blast all day and night. I’d go home for a couple hours of sleep, but when I’d return to work there would be a new, even larger stack of bug reports waiting for me.