I just caught up on this, I'm very disappointed.
Firstly, let's assume you're entirely innocent and there was no Trojan. Why did you delete your entire harddrive with Windows installation if there was no problems? That makes no sense.
So there WAS a trojan, which still doesn't make any sense for you to delete your entire hardrive. How did it get there? Why did it only infect the files containing the game you're going to publish onto the Internet?
Secondly, why would you not backup your game on the cloud? You're a developer, you've spent time on this work. Now, to be fair most f95zone developers including a lot of translating groups don't know what version control is. But they do know what Google Drive, One Drive, Box, or any of those drag and drop interfaces are.
Thirdly, assuming you did delete the game from your local computer, you don't have to restart since there's probably tens or hundreds of copies of your latest release on the Internet. All you need to do is download it, pirate your own game, and keep working from there.
I only played the very first release of this game, I was even a Patron for a month or two. But this is just either pure incompetence and/or malice.
Right. The simple answer is... yes, I'm that dumb. xD
I can explain each of your questions, yes, but I don't think it's really that important. In these few months, I think I've progressed a lot with the game, and as hardworking as I am, I'll have a better version really soon.
But yes, basically, I never uploaded a backup online, and my computer was indeed full of trojans, so I installed Windows 11 on one of the two hard drives I have. Apparently, I was too distracted with other things, maybe I rushed, or maybe I'm just too dumb as I said already, and ended up installing it in the hard drive I spent two days backing up everything on.
The thing is, using one of my own uploads of the game wouldn't work because I can't get the models and everything from it to keep making similar renderings and animations, so I created new ones, which I actually think look way better. Take a look:
I read you only played the initial release, so maybe you would like to take a look at one of a few animations I added to the last version:
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On the other hand, I've been criticized for having too much text in the game and for the RPG Maker mechanics, so I'm making the new game way shorter in that sense, and I'll just release the long version in a pdf file or whatever, for those interested in reading the big whole story. I'm also probably going to remove the little sprite's RPG mechanics completely and just focus on images and animations.
But yeah, in general, it's as bad as you described it, and I feel ashamed. Still, I prefer to take it as an opportunity to make a better game. It's fine if I don't get patrons for some time. I enjoy this, and although I would love to fully dedicate my time to things like these, it's probably not realistic, and even if it is, I like my job, so there's no rush.