Hello folk. Sadly this blog I am not as chirpy or happy as my others because something drastic happened to my hard drive and re-installing Vista wiped it all. So in that process I lost all my game files for Lost in paradise and day by day I'm remembering more about what I had on that HD. A couple of days ago I realised it was also the drive I stored all my MIDI creations and films I've shot. I've never been one to back up because I've never known a re-install of Windows to erase an entire HD, so I have no idea why it happened now - it's not like I selected any options to format it.
This has left me depressed and unsure how to continue. Years of work is un-done. When I wake up I am still getting the buzz to work on my game - but it's gone - and it puts me down. The 60 minutes of music I wrote for it is gone and I'll never be able to rework it. This has left me in a very unsure position now as to my game making future.
I went to Mittens which was excellent fun and we worked on a new Ben Jordan movie which took my mind off these things, and don't get me wrong - I love it. But besides editing that, I'm almost afraid to use a PC now for fear it will just destroy my livelihood again.
People have been most kind and have sent me recovery programs that scan the HD, and as it happened a few days before Mittens I tried to recover what I could and got many of the games WMV animation files back. But after Mittens I ran another scan and nothing could be found on the HD. It seemed time alone erased the remainder of stuff, and that pisses me off, cos I could have rescued the soundtrack too.
So now I don't really know what to do. Do I restart the project, do I start a new one. Do I just pack game-making in for a while cos it's been nothing but fraught & un-successful for me since I began, (except for making music for people I suppose). I don't know. It's a major knock and I know others have suffered HD failure and lost their stuff and have been kind enough to give me advice and stuff...but I don't know. It's hard if not impossible to talk about this in the real world - normal people can understand losing their pictures and downloaded MP3's, but losing an entire legacy of your creations is something else, and hundreds of hours of rendering, composing, programming, editing....bleh.
We'll see what happens next, hopefully something good because 2010 has been an ultra shit year for me.
Peace
