How do you guys deal with losing work on your game?

[LazerShark]

Basically, let's say I'm working on an rpgmaker game. Let's say I forgot to close the program when I shutdown my computer. And some files became corrupted. Most of the work, and the most important bulk of the game, really, just happen to be ok, but it's still annoying to fix the corrupted parts. Basically all switches and variables names are blank, tilesets are gone, as well as scripts, and I will have to spend a few hours renaming the switches, retiling the maps, and looking for the scripts online, as well as some other work. This is demotivating as fuck, and I know very well some of you lost actual hours of work of your games, if not days. Yet some of you hold strong. How do you guys keep going after that? If this bump in the road is enough to throw me off, am I fit for porn game development? How do you guys regain motivation? Thank you.
Also, please share your annoying stories of losing work on your games. I want to feel less alone in this issue.

 

[Insomnimaniac Games]

Lost about four hours of work once. RPGM crashed and did weird stuff when I hit save. I just... re-did everything. I have a "complaining ain't gonna fix it" mindset, so I just made a cup of tea and buckled down to fix it. When it comes to motivation, it's a dangerous thing to rely on in the first place. In a years time after the game's first release, motivation wanes. It needs to be replaced with something else. Discipline, stubbornness, etc.

Good luck, hope it works out!

 

[AdelphiaGaming]

I think it was Toy Story that nearly lost everything, and it was one artist who was working from home/not working that had a copy. It just reiterates the importance of off-site backups. Everyone's lost work at some point. I've even lost 500 frames of animation that were each individually keyframed due to a power outage (get a UPS, too).

Obviously not quite the same scale as you, but just take a breath and see what needs to be re-added. Compartmentalize everything. Tiles? In a box. Renaming switches? In a box. Scripts? In a Box. Do one thing at a time and you'll be back before you know it. The important thing to understand is that you've already done the work, and probably a lot of it. So, what's a little bit more? And luckily, since you know what you're doing, it'll just come that much quicker.

 

[papel]

During my game's development, I started making backups once I realized my hard drive was dying out, when one of my krita files suddenly got corrupted. A few days later, I had to restore a backup that was a couple days old because the hd died out for good. Lost some progress, but since I was "expecting" it, it didn't destroy my will. What annoyed me the most was that most of the progress was about stuff I drew and animated in Godot, which took many hours to redo.

So, anything you deem important needs to have a separate backup, even if it's just on a separate folder, but ideally on an external drive or even a USB stick. One copy can save your ass.

How do you guys keep going after that? If this bump in the road is enough to throw me off, am I fit for porn game development? How do you guys regain motivation?

Take a breath, maybe a day off, then get back. Losing progress sucks and I remember one time I lost a whole fucking database for a college assignment on the day before it was due. I cried of anger and despair, went to sleep 3am, but redid the fucking thing.

 

[Mister-Saturn]

If you’re on windows 11 have 1 or 2 backup sources other than local. One drive loves to shit on your local files so Microsoft can shill their cloud services. Get into the habit of saving offsite. Also consider this a lost project and give yourself a fresh start mentally.

 

[Winterfire]

1. Don't be forgetful, as this shows you're getting distracted during it. Either put your mind into it, or don't.
2. Create a github account and sync your project, or do any other form of frequent backup to make sure that in the worst case scenario, only a small part if any of your work is lost.

 

[Sewyoba]

Basically, let's say I'm working on an rpgmaker game. Let's say I forgot to close the program when I shutdown my computer. And some files became corrupted.

In some cases, you can use tools like Disk Drill to restore deleted files. RPGMaker is probably storing temporary stuff somewhere in APPData folders, if disk location wasn't overwritten, you can undo deletion with a proper tool

 

[eevkyi]

(...)
2. Create a github account and sync your project, or do any other form of frequent backup to make sure that in the worst case scenario, only a small part if any of your work is lost.

While their policies aren’t enforced most of the time,

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and other platforms such as

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and

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clearly prohibit hosting adult content. The only platform I can think of that’s friendly to adult content, as long as the material is legal in the US, is

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.

 

[Winterfire]

While their policies aren’t enforced most of the time,

You must be registered to see the links

and other platforms such as

You must be registered to see the links

and

You must be registered to see the links

clearly prohibit hosting adult content. The only platform I can think of that’s friendly to adult content, as long as the material is legal in the US, is

You must be registered to see the links

.

All devs use it, it's not like you're going to make it public anyway. It's all private for you and your team members.
But yeah, you can choose others, even DropBox I guess... I don't have experience outside of GitHub, or just manually making backups in my drives.

Ultimately, any backup at all is better than none