When you lose progress on your project.

So, I recently had my computer break down, and to make a long story short, I ended up losing all the data on my computer. I managed to find a backup of my project, but I've lost a significant amount of progress, including a rather long bonus dungeon. Now, I'm wondering if I even want to continue the project or not. Anyone else go through this?

While I haven't lost progress due to a HD failure, I have spent time making content for the game that I've had to cut in the end. For example, back in 2015 I ended up deciding to cut an entire Chapter as it no longer fit the game, which cost me about 2 hours of playtime + the 2 - 3 months it took to make that Chapter.

Data loss is unfortunate, but almost no one is safe from it and it will probably eventually happen (at least once in your life). When composing the battle theme for my game, everything was almost done after 8 hours of work and then I got a Blue Screen of the Death. I lost everything and had to redo it. It sucks, but sometimes you just need to find the will to push through hardships.

Erm... i don't know, that cannot happen to me because i back up my project every minutesss!

@Isabella Ava Well, let's say that you didn't update your backup for like 3 days of work and you get a BSoD that corrupts your data. Not likely to happen, but still possible.

That's really demotivating. But usually, a redone of your work has better result. So I keep moving forward. Sometimes I was glad my progress was lost because the new one was much better.

I'm currently on a scenario like bgillisp, cutting the entire content of the game and remake it from scratch. It went into a better direction now.

@TheoAllen : Mine wasn't quite cut the entire game. More like I had Chapters 1 - 4 done and then realized that Chapter 3 was poor and ended up cutting it and making Chapter 4 now Chapter 3, and moved the needed scenes there.

Changed the entire game too from a 10 Chapter story to a 9 Chapter story when I did that, but I think it's better off for it.

Welp, I was saying this because my entire game content was pretty much like one chapter, and it really was one chapter. Nothing was big and long, so cutting this chapter is like cutting entire content.

Good point. Losing 2 hours of content can be your entire project easily depending on where you are at. Though I did forget to mention I actually restarted my project 4 times before I finished it also, so in that first year I had 4 total wipes where I redid everything.

Here's my advice, from someone who's lost significant progress to corruptions or computer crashes before: man up, and get back to work. Don't quit. It's easy to throw your hands up and say you're not interested anymore, but the mere fact that it hurts you that you lost your progress means that you do care. Don't let bad luck defeat you. Now that you've come up with ideas and designs while making this content the first time, it will be easier and faster to make it the second time (and you may even come up with better ideas than you had the first time around).

I agree with @Wavelength. Don't give up on your project. As a matter of fact just think of it as debugging. I mean a lot of time goes in to debugging and testing out. Cutting the wrong snippet can cause total chaos and discombobulation.
And as you sit and stir at the monitor in dismay a sudden warmth come over your ears and....>_>
You know what?!
I think that I feel this feeling when...

• I realize my last session wasn't saved.
• when my tile sets need constant readjusting.
• When I run into a bug I don't know how to fix.
• When I realize I need a plugin that's not available.
• When I ....

The point is it's just another road block. Walk around it, Squeeze through it and stuff.
Speaking of road blocks I ran into a couple of bugs in my one map, So it's been sitting.
I opened it and thought to myself "What in the world?! I really need to learn to use comments"
It almost feels the same as when my save didn't go through and I lost about an hour worth of work.
So please don't scrap your project.
I'm glad we had this discussion, It has motivated me to not give up on my one map.
Thanks @Wavelength :cutesmile:

You could always use something like github. Set your repository to private and you'll have control over who can see and commit to it.

For any serious project, some kind of source control (a cloud based one) should be set up. It is literally an easy way of having a version of your project at various points in time that you can return to as needed as well as making it easy for others to collaborate on it (as opposed to passing the project around). In the worse case, you only lose what you have not committed and my philosophy is each feature (or a sub feature if the feature is big and needs breaking up) is a commit.

I first started making a 2D Platformer in Game Maker. It was going well, then I tried to code in wall jumping. It wasn't working. So I closed the program down and gave it a few days rest while I tried to go through in my mind why the code wasn't working.

A few days later, I opened the program back up and... the entire file was corrupt. I had a backup, though, and... that was the exact same. I was heartbroken.

I ended up forgetting about the 2D platformer, and decided to finally make use of RPG Maker VX Ace, and so began my work on an RPG game lol. If this ended up getting corrupted/deleted/broken/whatever, I honestly don't think I could start again. Not a second time.

Close to a year ago my hard drive crashed on my laptop and I lost everything. I mean everything. Some personal photos, some business tax stuff, my project, all the resources that took hours and hours to find on foreign language sites that I still can't remember where I found them. I was pretty bummed out because I was close to a demo. Always backup your stuff externally. If you're using something cloud based like OneDrive, don't keep your project there but rather a copy of it because the cloud has been known to corrupt people's files. I tried to revisit that project when I finally got a new laptop and it was turning out way better than it was originally but still had that bad taste in my mouth and redoing also meant changing things, which has turned into something else entirely.

Don't let a broken project stop you, it was just the powers that be saying "hey, your project could be better, let me help you by forcing you start over from scratch."

@MysteryMan23 Around two years ago, I accidentally deleted my 30 maps game. I understand that you feel sad right now which is normal. I think you should continue your projects. One thing you need to remember is now you have more experience than before; you can do it better than before. I believe in you and I hope you find your love in RPG maker again.:kaohi:

I lost nearly all of the systems, scripting and database work I had done on what I intend to be my "big flagship game". Every JSON besides Animations was corrupted. In my case though, it was valuable for me because it taught me 1. to religiously make backups of my projects, to the point where I have an external hard drive I bought just for backups along with a Google Drive account used for backups only too, and 2. that I was not ready to make that game yet. The scale of the content I have to include in that game is crazy huge and I didn't even have each party member's skill list planned out so I realised it was way too early for me to begin putting stuff together in-engine. So I switched gears and began an entirely different project while burning away at planning and preproduction for the first game. Both games are coming along solidly now, with one nearly done story-wise and mechanics-wise, and the other with a lot more content and planning fleshed out so that when I start on it again, I'll be so much more ready.

There's always lessons to be learned in adversity, if you're open to them. No creative venture goes a hundred percent smoothly, and if you're going to be in the creative industries you need to be humble, self-critical and always be looking for what you can learn from the trials you face, and then get back on your feet and apply those lessons to your next project.

My last IGMC game, on the last week I think my game file became corrupted (the game was called Corruption, the irony was not lost on me. lol) and I lost everything. Luckily I had my script in a word document and I'd taken mapshots of all my maps as I finished them, so I at least was able to use the maps as paralax, but the amount of time I spent redoing what I'd already done was very disheartening, especially as this ws for a contest and I'd devoted every spare miniute I'd had that month.

The game was not what I wanted, and I do intend to go back and finish it, but I feel a little worried in case it all happens again! Even though I know to do loads of backups off the computer now! lol

I'm using RPG Maker for a long time - since 2007. And during one of my developments of a gamed called "Soul Orb" in late 2008 my computer froze while I was mapping in VX, I had to restart just to discover all data files had been corrupted. I lost everything of a game that was 1/4 completed, but that I had taken more than 75 hours to achieve.
An year later, working a joke project that I ended up taking seriously, I had a similar problem but instead of the computer freezing it was two blackouts that happened in my city that forced me to restart just the find the data corrupted again...