Favourite Part of Gamedev?

Here are my favourite parts about creating games:

1. The freedom of the prototyping stage.
2. The way it feels like a complex puzzle, that feeling when you see the impact from something you've changed.
3. Conquering a problem, feeling like a demigod, and crashing and burning on a new one the next day.
4. Writing data (mainly map) parsers/editors.
5. When the thing works. :/
6. Working and iterating on core game mechanics.
7. Getting that first prototype ready and making my first trailer.
8. The challenge of marketing.
9. And finally, watching the reactions of those who play it for the first time. A single smile makes all the effort,blood and sweat put into the **** game worthwhile. :)

I've worked on both the dev and publishing side of things, so exposed to pretty much everything (either did myself or attended meetings with those that did).

Personally, I find most of publishing a bit dull. Some of the marketing is kind of interesting, but a lot is often passed to agencies. The data analytics of player behaviour/sentiment is pretty fascinating.

Me, I'm in it for the tech. There aren't many industries that hit such a broad problem space: memory/CPU/GPU/IO limits, network bandwidth/latency, security, server scalability/response time, math, optimization, cutting-edge hardware/APIs, and so on. There's pretty significant changes every few years such that I rarely end up doing the same thing for very long and there's always new things to learn and work on.