I wish I could go into more detail, but I'm a little reluctant to risk outting a friend. Plus I can't remember a lot of the details well enough to provide a complete picture.

One idea I can convey is how they'd spent an insane amount of time on things like minigames and itemization, and still hadn't bothered to implement any kind of character movement, combat, jumping, etc. Actually iirc, they were still undecided about whether or not to even include jumping.

And I say this even while being thoroughly aware that a lot of game development time does tend to be spent on the framework. Structural stuff to make a lot of the meat of a game much easier to produce (IE, things like NPC generation, damage systems, stuff that's going to be ingrained into a lot of the core gameplay, code-wise.)