This question is moreso aimed for the creative types here but what’s a game / genre / etc that had something you always took for granted, until you tried doing something similar yourself?
Can be music, an art style, a game mechanic, or just something more general like story beats or unique spins for genres
Personally I never realized how much work it took to balance items in a rogue like game to keep them all fun and relevant without having players just end up going for the same 2 or 3 items every single run
There’s also the honorable mention of back when I started game dev like 4-5 years back and couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to do basic stuff like keeping save files at a reasonable storage cap (and just generally optimizing my code to not run like shit lmaooo)
I modded a character into Rivals of Aether (A Super Smash Bros-like Indie game) and did all the sprite work myself. One thing thats a bit surprising is how many animations you have to do for a single character; even a simple one.
Even though theres a fair number of attacks, theres all these other smaller animations you probably dont even notice normally when playing the game that are nonetheless important for game feel and making sure the character looks good. Dash start and stop, walk and dash turn, teching, landing, landing lag, Hurt, pratfall, Big hurt (took a big hit), spin hurt, etc. This is even ignoring ADDITIONAL states your character might be in for their gimmicks. You can ignore or copy past some animations if you’re a bit lazy or dont mind losing some fidelity, but alot of these are more important than you’d think to either communicate something to the player or just so your character doesnt look jank as hell.