What to Write Down When You Are Finished
An hour spent working through a catalogue produces findings that will be gone in a fortnight unless they are recorded. What to record is not obvious, because the temptation is to write down impressions, and impressions are the part least worth keeping.
Record structure, not experience
How a session felt is a property of the session rather than the game, and a note saying a title was generous or cold is a note about a sample of two hundred rounds. It will contradict the next session and it will mislead the version of you that reads it later.
Structural facts do not have this problem. Line count, symbol ratio, feature type, trigger requirement, spin count and round duration are fixed for the life of the build, and a note recording them remains exactly as true in three years as on the day it was written.
Record the groupings
Which titles share an engine is the most valuable finding and the hardest to reconstruct later. Write the families down explicitly, with the evidence — matching tier depth, identical rule phrasing — so that the grouping can be trusted rather than half-remembered.
Record the outliers and why
Working through a listing like DemoSlotVibe typically surfaces two or three titles that break the house pattern, and the reason each one qualified is what makes the note useful. A bare list of unusual games is worth little; a list saying which structural property broke and by how much is a starting point for every future visit.
The same note also tells you what to check when the studio ships something new. If the outliers were all grid formats, the studio is drifting, and the next release is more likely to belong to the new template than the old one.
- Write down six structural figures per representative title
- List the engine families with the evidence that established them
- Name the outliers and state which property broke
- Record the hourly cost figure at your usual stake
- Leave out impressions of generosity or coldness entirely
Record the hourly figure
Rounds per hour multiplied by your usual stake, per shortlisted title. This is the number that describes what an evening costs, it varies by a factor of two across formats, and it is published nowhere. Having it written down converts every future stake decision from a guess into arithmetic.
Where to keep it
Somewhere that survives a browser clearing its history, which rules out bookmarks and tabs. A plain text file with one line per game is sufficient and takes ten seconds to search, and the format matters less than the fact that it is not stored inside the interface being assessed.
What the note is actually for
Making the next decision in thirty seconds instead of an hour. That is the entire return, and it compounds: the sheet gets more useful with each catalogue added, while the effort per catalogue stays flat.
