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
1 comment:
Hey, mods!
I never knew how to comment on this, despite long wanting to say something so smart and profound that it could be also considered comforting.
...However all I can ever think of is only this: 'those virtual creations and databases are really a weird and unnatural thing'. As a kid I considered my game CDs and game boxes something entirely physical and permanent - something to keep, but now that I released my own virtual piece of entertainment I feel like I simply told someone a story (like verbally and a single time) and it's odd to think that it is kept archived and perpetuated by lots of people now. The game also meant to me the most was truly alive while I was still working on it.
Anyway, about your loss... it's certainly a terrible one, but also very personal one - nobody will ever know what was the value of the things you've lost except for yourself. And perhaps even you, because of the virtual, ephemeral nature of what you lost will soon stop to notice anything is missing.
Sorry, for the long nonsense, but you had a dreadful void in the comments section that desperately needed filling up.
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