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About the Dev Logs

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What Are the Dev Logs?

In an effort to remain as transparent and communicative about the development of Limit Theory as possible, I will post my work statistics each day to give you an idea of how I spent the day. Indeed, you'll actually get to see (in excruciating detail) my work habits!

The goal behind publishing the logs is twofold: first, it provides a constant reminder that LT is alive and well, and that I am still working as hard as possible to deliver the game to you! Second, it helps keep me accountable for working at maximal efficiency. Just knowing that I have to publish daily logs will mentally help me to stay efficient, since I'll always know that I don't want to disappoint by publishing bad stats for a day!

How Accurate are the Logs?

Extremely. I run a software called Manic Time in the background on my computer at all times, and it tracks the exact amount of time that I spend in each application. I then assign certain "tags" to applications, which allows me to generate reports of how I spent the time in a day.

Granted, these reports don't account for everything. There are some things that I don't have tags set up for, like Windows Explorer, since it's too general to say what I was doing at the time. Still, the tags that I will publish account for roughly 90% of my time on any given day.

For the business and thinking tags, I tag these manually, since they are not associated with a particular program.

What Does Each Tag Mean?

Business - I'm doing something business-related for LT like responding to press, meeting with someone, etc.
Coding - I'm in my code editor or debugger.
Internet - I'm in Google Chrome (could be forums, email, researching, stack overflow, etc.)
Testing - I'm in the Limit Theory executable (playtesting a new feature or having fun)
Thinking - I'm spending some quality time with pen & paper, working out functionality before coding it

What's the Goal?

My rather-lofty goal is 11 hours coding + thinking per day, a maximum of 2 hours internet (mostly forum time), and as little playtest time as possible (force myself to playtest efficiently and only when necessary). I have found that coding and thinking hours are equally productive, and one without the other is not productive. Hence, a rough metric for how productive I've been during the day would be coding + thinking time (although I still report them separately, for the sake of precision).

Granted, I won't hit that goal everyday, but setting a high target ensures maximal efficiency!
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford

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