Foreword

I have tagged this as a postmortem post as I do not know if this project will ever continue development. In this post, I aim to explain what happened, as well as provide a retrospective on the game and what it has taught me.  For those who haven't played it, it's a silly game where you play as a lemon and do things that I'm not sure how to describe at times, it is very stupid but fun I think.

Okay then, what happened?

As you could've guessed from the title of this postmortem, I indeed did not make a backup, well I did- okay let me explain, it's a bit complicated. So, let's go back to I want to say around September to October of last year. Everything is going great, the really huge update 2 to the game is coming along really nicely, it's about 85% done, just have to add somethings, finish others and debug it a little. I make backups from time to time just in case something goes wrong but not too often, because nothing could go THAT wrong, right?

Everything then proceeded to go wrong. My computer of choice at the time was a gaming laptop, which as you probably know, are not known for their longevity. I've had it for three years up to that point with no issues, until suddenly one it just decided to not work anymore (there is more to it, but it's not super relevant so let's just say it stopped working). I have no experience in servicing laptops, so I brought it to a repair shop, where after a lot of experimenting, they discovered that the issue was with the CPU, which on a laptop like the one I had essentially meant that it was as good as scrap.

You would not guess what was on that laptop's SSD. That is right, the latest version of the game that has not been backed up yet. I did have a back up computer, an older model ThinkPad I bought for cheap as an experimental pet project I never expected I'd ever actually have to use for anything, which means that yes, I was technically able to still continue from there had I made the back up and the update would've probably been released months ago, but unfortunately it is stuck on the drive of a dead machine. And I don't doubt that there are ways I could still get it off the drive, but at this point I'm not even sure I am in the right mindset to continue working on this game.

I have always heard people talk about how you should make back ups of your projects. And I kind of listened. But as I've learned the hard way, doing something halfway is like not doing it at all. If you are reading this, for the love of all that is holy, unholy and anywhere in-between, back up projects that you care about. Do it regularly, ideally daily, or if you're feeling adventurous, more than that, maybe hourly. And When you're doing it, do it properly. Put it in a cloud, put it on an external drive, hell burn it onto a DVD for all I care, but please, PLEASE get multiple back ups if you are really taking it seriously. You don't want to end up like me.

In Retrospect

This game was really the first of its kind for me, being the biggest project I'd ever worked on by a mile. It was not meant to be that, it just started as a 5 minute joke game-adjacent thing that then got very out of hand. Two things I have learned from this is that you should plan whatever you're doing from the beginning.  First of all, it'll give you the option to make everything neatly fit together without you having to botch things together so that they fit together good enough. Considering the absurd nature of the project, this wouldn't really be an issue for me as although I have written myself into a corner, it's fine, it's just a stupid game. What perhaps is more universal is that you'll also be less likely to fall victim to feature creep. 

This is the game I have spent more time on than every other game I've ever made combined. And how far did that get me? I actually got pretty far through finishing ...Act I, out of three. This was planned to be an absurdly huge project. And it was going to be an absolute mess, but I continued regardless until I couldn't.  And maybe that is for the better.

I don't really like to talk about this point, but this game came out during a very strange time for me. A lot in my life changed during the development cycle. I learned a lot of things. I learned how NOT to run a community center. I don't want to talk about the awful failure that was the discord server made mostly for this one game. Never doing that again. It was also made during what was probably my last time where I had enough free time to undertake a project like that (not like I would ever want to do anything like this again.) I am really at the point at which I am actually becoming an adult, I've changed a lot in the last year.

Thinking about this project in general just makes me sad. It carries a lot of emotional weight for me that I don't know if I can even fully process. Sorry for getting so close to threading the TMI line towards the end but I felt as though it was necessary. I think this really covers everything I wanted to say