Sometimes work more than 40 hours? During crunch-time I've regularly worked 60 hours a week with occasional all-nighters / sleeping in the office. "Over-worked, under-paid, and loving it" - A favorite quote I heard somewhere about game programmers

In 6 years, I've done overtime on only one project, voluntarily, because I put my hand up to lead it so I felt partly responsible (a few weeks of crunch at the end of a project -- mostly babysitting the build machine and assisting the QA manager).

Earlier this year, the team I was on were asked to start doing 50 hour weeks to help get a game out the door -- the "rock-star" lead programmer resigned right there on the spot (he had been telling management for the entire project that the schedule was out by approx 2 months, and unless we corrected our deadlines we'd end up in this situation, and they'd been ignoring him), and I simply refused the request and started doing exactly 40 hours to make a point, and then also resigned a few weeks later. That company is now bleeding staff, and their game is still 2 months behind schedule anyway. If they'd simply admitted they screwed up and then moved the deadline, they'd still have all their senior staff and the game would be at the same stage of completion anyway. Completely stupid short-term thinking on their part...
Fuck crunch -- it's not productive. Someone coding 60 hours a week is less productive than someone doing 40 hours, that's a science fact. I don't want to have to fix the bugs caused by your fatigue, so go the fuck to sleep!

You employer doesn't own you unless you don't stand up for yourself. It's the people like you who let employers walk all over them (assuming you're at a large company) that instil this abusive culture in the workplaces of the rest of us, and allows incompetent managers to continually promise impossible schedules and budgets to publishers... Why should you be the one to pay when your management has screwed up the scheduling?

besides just hours (which are long) and lines of code (your average per week?), what aspects of the game are you tasked to accomplish per week? is it anything like finish a quarter of the game engine or implement a pathfinder?

Everywhere I've worked, I've been given tasks and asked for estimates. My own estimates are my deadlines -- if I think that re-writing the engine's texture loader will take 3 weeks, then my supervisor will expect it done in around 3 weeks, but will check in with me every week to see how it's progressing and get updated estimates. If I get 2 days into the task and realise I'll have it done this week, I'll let my supervisor know the good news, and likewise, if I hit some road-block that means that it's gonna take 2 months, I'll also let my supervisor know the new estimate and explain why/what's gone wrong.

I'm an experienced engine programmer, so I'm often given fairly large/difficult tasks, which span several months, and have to be broken into lots of sub-tasks by myself. The less experienced programmers are usually given smaller tasks, which their lead knows will only take them a day or so to complete, like: write a new shader, or add this new HUD item, or add random texture swapping to this monster.
N.B. even though you're working a 40 hour week, you should only be expected to do maybe 30 hours of work -- meetings, scrums, coffee breaks, random conversations, being bugged by some random artist as to why their model is broken and spontaneous brainstorming will eat up a lot of time, and a good lead will know this and schedule you with an appropriate amount of slack.

Lines-of-code-per-hour is a useless number. To illustrate, I was once given a horrible bug where, after 6 weeks of investigation, I finally found the cause, which was a single line of code. That's 240 hours to write a single line of code, but without that one line, the game wouldn't have been able to pass the QA tests and be shipped.

In what area are you located?
60h/week is common here and we're not Sillicon Valley. I've been in three different studios (publisher and vendor) and can attest that its more of the same in that regard.
Crunches that last for 6-12 months are not really crunches, they're signs of very bad planning, but they are common here regardless.
You appear to be based in Melbourne. I have unfortunately no knowledge on how Australia game dev biz differs from north america, but I'm going to assume that could play into the difference between our experience of this industry's culture.

You must not assume that it's a national or regional difference. Not every company in North America commonly crunches for a year at a time. Not every company in Australia rejects crunch 100% of the time.

It is not a national/regional thing. Rejection of crunch is a moral and lifestyle choice. Acceptance of crunch is often out of economic necessity. And yes, crunching more than a month or so is a sign that somebody has planned badly, and somebody is managing badly, and somebody is unreasonable or not communicating fully.

This thread has deviated too far from the original topic. I'm closing it. Anyone wanting to discuss something other than "what are some of the responsibilities you would typically be expected to complete in any given week" is free to start a new thread.