Trying to Measure/Organize Hobby Dev

I've fiddled around with a variety of unreal project on and off for years. Primarily for fun and minor dev experience. Naturally while trying to learn more about best practices, blueprint coding, and the engine in general. I've had plenty of aspirations while brainstorming, but ultimately know right now its all hobbyist. That said I've lamented not at least trying to document any of it. Especially since I've waffled across a few projects based off fleeting inspiration a couple of times now. (All which I tell myself I'll bounce back to when the mood strikes - we'll see about that lol). That said I know I don't have the time or focus these days to write thick paragraph blogs like when I was unemployed in 2019. So the goal is just to really document anything I've made/working on in a given moment in the barest of terms. While doing my best to avoid the waxing poetic or ramble about theory. 

Beyond just making separate posts each of the unfinished prototypes I've worked, am working on, or want to work on, I want to try my attention span at a log of sorts. Since everything I do is only a few hours of free time at a time, I figure each time I call it for the night, it shouldn't be too hard to make a simple log of the date, time spent, and basic work summary. Like a repo change list description I suppose. I think I wanna do this half because its motivating to see my tangible time commitment/progress, and half because it'll be any amount of discipline for me to keep while working on anything. I have to imagine that's a step better than my scatter-brained google-design-docs or writing myself task lists as unreal blueprint comments. 

ALSO, I've always wanted a legitimately well polished and presented portfolio piece. Like ya know, like a professional level designer might have. Every professional work project is vastly different, shrouded in the development process, and I suppose that makes me miss the days of "showing my work" in college a bit. An attempt to actually measure my design's quality and maybe even time investment (roughly). So the current prototype I've been fiddling with should be the subject of these first "log" blog posts. That project is an unabashed dishonored-like in UE5, first person, prioritizing stealth gameplay, and thoughtful level design. Stretch goals feature Immsim design philosophy for systemic interactions if I don't get completely lost in the sauce (I will). Genuinely though, in the spirit of discipline and posting something I'm actually proud of here, I'm gonna try to focus only on vertical slice mechanics that serve it being a level design piece over systems. Regardless of how many world building and story theme notes I've already scribbled in my google-design-doc. 

Here's video of my first pass of the first priority for me for this. Climbing <3 Was genuinely proud of myself for managing to get this working as quick as I did. Only a few hours the first night sat down to work on it. To be logged here.