What would you do if....

... you spent 2 years working on a game that is your best work. You've kept it secret from the world. But all the files were on your laptop and your laptop was crushed under a train and the cloud server you had backups on was flooded and all the files were lost. Basically all your work is destroyed.

1. Start again.
2. Do another game.
3. Give up and change careers entirely.
4. End it all! :O

I'm sure in the old days before the cloud this must have happened lots of times.

 

In the (good) old days before the cloud people realized they needed to take control of their own backup system. Those people probably still handle that responsibility themselves, rather than relying on the cloud / heaven / angels / god... etc.

Besides beyond just "backup" issues do people really send off their intellectual work to some third-party cloud company? Do cloud companies sign NDA's? just askin'

 

but to answer your question... start over and do something BETTER than last time!

 

What choice would you have? Move on, make a new project or start over on the same one, but do it better. If anything, you still learned and grew working on that lost project, so in a way part of it would survive through you as you carry on with a new project.

 

Correct, I don't rely on the cloud and I don't just keep my files on one machine. It's extremely unlikely that I could lose it all, so my answer is "N/A". Really the only thing that would do it is something like a huge EMP strike or a comet impact or something, in which case there are bigger problems.

--Eric

 

When all you have to worry about is Snake Pliskin, you're doing well.

 

5. Kill myself.

 

Option 4 already covered that...no need for two "end it all" options, unless you're exceptionally hard to kill I guess....

--Eric

 

I though the 'end it all' was about development career only.

 

Well, I could apply it to my monster truck game which I've spent most of my spare time on over the last 3 years, including a very large sum of money

If that had to happen I think I would give up and go live a peaceful life in a Buddhist monastery in Tibet and never look at another PC again.

 

This.

Hopefully you learned a lot during that time, and that will add huge value to whatever you do next.

First and foremost, I hope you learned to back things up properly.

 

Think of it as an opportunity to do that rewrite that you always wanted to do once the project was done. I think you'll be surprised at how fast you'll be able to redo the whole thing.

 

Have to agree with that, that's pretty much what I would do. Since you already know what you need to do and how, it's the perfect excuse to make everything more efficient. Art assets would be a bit of a bigger loss if they were detailed, but that can be remade eventually too

 

Well, I lost a fair amount of work the other day when my computer suddenly died. Just a tonne of prototypes though and I'm not really fussed over it. Sometimes having something clear your agenda is a good thing, I had lots of prototypes being worked on and not really getting anywhere, I was going to format but couldn't bring my self to do it. Now I don't have to.

I may sound almost happy that happened but all my schoolwork is stored on my locker on the school network, my school PC, my USB and my laptop. I'm spending around $500 on a NAS box though which will give me a backup of my next personal project on a RAID 1 2TB NAS asset server, then I will have my Raspberry Pi at my mums house that will keep the latest version, and in my DropBox, unless my laptop died again, my NAS fails on both drives, drop box dies and my Raspberry pi breaks down I'll be sweet. Its so unlikely I'd discount it as a possibility. Not to mention that if I do an IOS build it will also be on my Macbook.

 

I'd have no choice but to start over. Which would probably only take 6 mos. The files may have been destroyed, but the idea remains in my head.

Good reminder to back up work, in several places.

 

I'd curse my life and everything around me for about an hour and get back to coding again. There isn't really anything we can do lol...