Here’s another little professional tip about the game industry that I picked up the hard way, rather than having anyone teach it to me in a formal or tutorial setting.

You are going to occasionally be called upon to change and revise manuscripts. It’s useful to keep a list of those changes.

This can be a big annoyance and time sink… but it can also save you a great deal of time and grief if you need to pass information about those changes on to someone, or revert to previous versions, or try to figure out why a thing that used to make sense now doesn’t.

Obviously one way to make a “Change Log” is to create a separate entry for each change you make. You can note what, where, why, when, and who. “Bonus for the Baking Defensively ability in the Halfling War baker class changed from +3 to +6, in response to playtest feedback about its effectiveness — Owen, 2/05/2021.”

That gives you a easily-referenced list with lots of information you could potentially want later. It can also take longer to document than making the change itself.

Since most word process programs have a way to track and show all changes, another option is just to make sure those options are in use before you make any change, and save a copy with the changes still shown into your archive. When a project is done, you can accept all the changes and get rid of such notes in your final draft, but still keep old versions in case you need to hunt down a change. This is much less time-consuming, but doesn’t give you nearly as much extra info (should you need it three years later when hired to revise the old book, for example).

I personally try to split the difference. If I’m doing revisions, I try to keep copies of old versions with changes tracked. If I do multiple major revisions, each one has changes from previous versions accepted, and then new changes tracked. And whenever something seems *important* for me or a developer or publisher to know, I create a comment within the document explaining it.

It’s a little extra work all the time, but a HUGE help on the rare occasions when it becomes important.

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