Post a Comment On: The Game Designer

Now that I'm done working on 야구의신 and able to once again work full-time on Baseball Mogul, I've been using Time Doctor's time-tracking software for the last 6 months to help me stay on task — and to help identify tasks that are eating up too much of my time. This is the raw data for hours of work during that time:

Project Hours Notes Sports Mogul Inc.113.02Responding to customer e-mail, editing the web site, writing newsletters, filing, accounting, taxes, payroll, etc. Other / Personal53.7Includes everything from reading Facebook to walking the dog (if done while Time Doctor is running). Football Mogul22.4 Baseball Mogul959.1See below
And this is a pie chart of the same data:
[Image] With 83% of my time being allocated to Baseball Mogul, I made a chart showing a more detailed breakdown of my time use for just Baseball Mogul:

[Image]
This chart doesn't tell me much, except that I was able to spend most of my time coding and debugging (including technical design etc.). This can be very difficult for small-business owners, and it's taken years to develop the necessary habits and focus — and to surround myself with the best people.
That big "PROGRAMMING / DEBUGGING" section can be further broken down into sub-tasks:
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One thing that stands out to me in this chart is the large amount of time spent on "Loading/Saving Game Data" and "Data Manipulation". This occurred because Baseball Mogul 2016 required a complete rewrite of the code that loads and saves your game data, in order to permanently fix a bug that was causing some players to lose "year-by-year" player stats. Going forward, I expect the amount of time spent on these two areas to drop significantly.