For me, I was working on a sequel to my game “Beat Light,” and I had the project file saved only on my laptop. Just when I was almost finished, I accidentally spilled water on it, and the laptop stopped working. I tried using a monitor and every method I could think of to get it working again, but nothing helped. Ultimately, I had to send it to the insurance company for approximately €200. But they said it was too damaged, so they gave me a newer model, the HP Elitebook 840 G9.
I was making two different games at once, spent a few months on both. Then, my drive figured out it was a good time to corrupt and went ahead and did so. Couldn't access the drive, so lost both games. Luckily, I found a software that decompiles built Unity games into a project folder so I got back one of them (it was shared on itch, so I could get the built version). The other one I did have a built version but it was on the drive as well.
Lesson for life: back up your stuff!
I got similar case of loosing a game but different circumstances. But it has to do with Unity. I have worked on a tank game for half a year. It was supposed to be 3d battle city sort of.
But then my life did a flip and I didn’t have time to work on it anymore.
Few years passed and my life was steady enough to come back to writing games.
And idiot of me I haven’t checked out that unity have phased out their cloud saves and ad integration… So eventually my whole game got corrupted and no amount of time and prying that crap out helped. I had to abandon it. I also abandoned Unity for Phaser.
Lost a hard drive suddenly in a storm out of nowhere once 15+ years ago before I was taking it especially seriously and some animations, recorded video files and game dev work down the drain back then but fortunately most of the really important stuff made it through. Now I make it a point to have cloud backup going on my work desktop! You should too. Personally I'm using backblaze but there are many good options out there. You should have a way to back everything up that's important if you can. There isn't really a good excuse not to. The typical IT advice is you ideally should have local backup of all important data (mirroring) plus offsite cloud backup. Three copies of everything across two locations means odds of stuff getting lost for good is very low. Make sure the backup system's automated and will keep up to date with changes with minimal time and fuss.
matthornb.itch.io - asset packs - 3d assets, decals, PBR seamless textures, VFX clips. Many sales on holidays and well over a dozen 5-star ratings to date. Thanks everyone for helping me get this off the ground!
Losing my coder.
I was working on a fan made remix of an ancient game around 15 or so years ago. After we put two demos out, my coder disappeared. Since I knew nothing about Game Maker (And still do not; my coding base is something entirely different), the project was useless to me, so it had to be abandoned. I still have most of the project resources from back then, including all the music I sequenced for it.
