Initially, thought it would be easy -- it's all simple logic, right? Will be far less tedious & mundane than doing web/app development, right? Haha. I was in

Initially, thought it would be easy -- it's all simple logic, right? Will be far less tedious & mundane than doing web/app development, right? Haha. I was in for quite the rude awakening, but luckily the challenges ended up being a pleasant and enjoyable surprise (at least on the whole). Lots of work is the answer, though. We actually got to Early Access release in ~11 months (~20 man-months). We had to learn a new programming language & learn a game engine during that time, too (and learn what a game engine really was/what it meant). Really though, I think the most difficult (and important) part was more about learning the nuances of game development, even just understanding the (understandably high) UX expectations that a player has from a game -- it took a while to really "get there" and I'm still learning, every day. It's also worth mentioning that SimAirport was really not very good when we initially released it -- definitely rushed to release, far too early, and it was a mess at that point. After the EA release another ~3yr of full-time development went into it (and more dev resources), and it became a much better game/product in that time. I wish I could work on SimAirport forever. That's the downside with the games industry; it's ultra competitive and the amount of competition is increasing every day. Much of "the money" is heavily concentrated at the "top" of the pyramid, amongst a relatively small selection of titles. It's not the easy way, I can say that with confidence.