Work archeology, Part 1

I was interested in taking a peek into my working habits. One way of doing this is by analyzing source control logs.

What’s source control? Imagine you’re typing a term paper. You neurotically press ctrl+S to save every few seconds, because you never know when your computer might decide to burst into flames.

Source control is basically the equivalent of pressing ctrl+S on your entire game project. Two big benefits are:

  1. it gives me peace of mind knowing a backup exists on some remote server machine, and

  2. if I break the game (this happens a lot), I can do the equivalent of “undo” and revert my game project to a previous revision.

Flotilla

By taking a look into how often you check in (save) files, you get an estimate as to when and how often you’re working. We’ll start by taking a look into the first Blendo game that used source control, Flotilla.

flotilla_monthly

Monthly

To the right is my monthly check in tally for Flotilla’s development.

Release: February 27, 2010

flotilla_weekly

Weekly

Here’s the total check ins per day.

I busted my butt every day, with Sunday somehow being the most busy. I don’t recommend doing this.

flotilla_hourly

Hourly

Here’s the tally for total check ins per hour.

I got sleep. That’s good.

I worked all day long. That’s bad. Seriously, don’t do that.

Air Forte

I next made Air Forte. Here’s what Air Forte’s development ended up looking like.

airforte_monthly

Monthly

I used new technology for Air Forte.

New technology is a wonderful thing and a terrifying red flag. New technology introduces a lot of unknowns, so I tried to scope Air Forte to be as manageable as possible. As a result of that scope, Air Forte’s development cycle was shorter than Flotilla’s.

Release: July 17, 2010

airforte_weekly

Weekly

Sundays went from most-busy to least-busy (thank goodness).

Wednesday remains the most active weekday.

airforte_hourly

Hourly

See that dip at the 12 PM hour? That’s me not working, and instead eating lunch. Always eat lunch.

Et al

I’ll next continue with log data from Atom Zombie Smasher and the in-progress Quadrilateral Cowboy.

To be continued, dear reader.

And for those interested in the visualization program that created these images: it’s a program I wrote using the C# binding of SFML. Here are the files:

_Blendo SVN vis (binary)_ _Blendo SVN vis (source code)_

To use it: 1. Go to TortoiseSVN > Show Log > Show All 2. Select everything (ctrl+a) 3. Right-click > Copy to Clipboard 4. Paste into a text file. Save the text file. 5. Run Blendo SVN vis. Select the text file.

Continued in Work Archeology, Part 2