And Then Swordoku Went Kaboom.

Well. That wasn't the update I was hoping to write.

After all the work getting Swordoku: Grid & Glory moving forward, we have gone rather abruptly from “let's finish these systems” to “why are these files empty?”

There was a hard crash. A harrrrrd crash.

And a ton of Swordoku's data went with it.

The to-do list just got considerably worse

The blacksmith, Sanctuary, shrines, vendor, the new visual effects and audio... a lot of the work I've been talking about is now caught up in this mess.

There are empty files all over the place, and the game is completely unplayable right now.

I'm attempting to rebuild it, but I'm still working out what can be recovered and what will need doing again. I don't have a neat damage report or a reassuring “everything is fine” ending to offer yet.

Everything is, quite noticeably, not fine.

At least there's a backup. Oh.

This is normally the part where you take a breath, restore the backup, and lose some work rather than a whole pile of it.

Except the nightly Synology backup I thought was still running had stopped a couple of months ago.

I hadn't checked.

So the backup I was counting on isn't there. Apparently my backup strategy had quietly become “assume it's working,” which has now received a fairly conclusive review.

And no, I haven't been using version control either. I probably should. I also hate GitHub, and that has been a very convenient excuse to keep putting the subject off.

Not feeling quite so convenient today.

For now, recovery comes first

Right now the job is to see what can be salvaged and start putting the project back together. Until I know more, I can't say how much of the missing work I'll get back or how much rebuilding is ahead.

It's a pretty rotten change of direction after finally getting the game into a playable state. I wanted to be making the next thing work, not trying to resurrect the things that already did.

But that's where we are.

Ah well. Let's see what we can recover.