So, back in the day when I was knee high to a 6502, and i owned a BBC Micro, i created a lot of quite simple 8-bit games which i stored on 5.25 inch floppy disks.

Thinking nothing of it, when i got a PC at 17 i stowed all these in my parents loft, only to find out many years later that everything i'd spent many years of my life on was now unreadable with no chance of recovery. All that survives of this part of my game development life is a few printed instruction manuals and some printed source code that is also now becoming unreadable as it was printed with cheap dot matrix ribbons on cheap paper.

My question relating to this anecdote is simple - have you ever lost any game you were writing beyond all hope? Maybe due to a backup failure, hard disk failure, lack of version control, or just doing what i did and assuming it would all still be readble in a few years time?

"Answers on a postcard please" :)

Something like this happend to me once. It happend in the more modern days, around 2010, but way before I ever knew what "soure control" was, or cared enough to make regular backups. I was developing a Super-Mario World clone alongside a thesis paper for my high school graduation. About a month before it had to be finished (we actually had a year for this), and I was done with most of the game and just had a little more paper to write, my hard drive crashed out of nowhere. That was some real shit, because not only did I lose all my progress, but also my graduation depended on it.

Long story short, in the end my parents got me a 800€ (1000$ I think) hard disk recovery, from some money they safed for me for later on. So I technically didn't lose it completely - but I quess not everybody would be able/willing to pay that much money for such a thing. It really sucked for me too, but I really couldn't have started all over again. :/ I also don't recall doing anything wrong, I unpluged the HDMI-cable while the PC was turned off the day before, but if come on - a PC is not an atom bomb, it can't be that sensible

So really guys, do your backups (or source control, even better)...

Yes. I had an AOS created in JASS. Pretty much a total conversion WC3 mod. It had gameplay similar to Dota, however, a much larger map, and any mobs you killed would go into a pool of creatures your team "owned" Every so often there would be an apocalypse event, where the 2 teams owned creatures would be spawned into the lanes. Was pretty fun, and had a couple hundred active players during primetime every day.

I also had a WC3 map that was essentially a precursor to COC-Style MMORTS'. You would choose a race, and build up a building base etc. You could build an army, and move it around on a world map. If a battle started (world map units attacked) all players would opt into joining the battle or not with nearby armies, and fight it out. Alliances/Diplomacy was a large part of it, and also the tech tree. Every base had unique features based on the total population (using population buildings) of their city while defending. Kobolds ammassed piles of gold depending on their population that units would get tempted to fight each other for. Spiders would get eggs that would hatch into spiders when enemies attacked near them. I think I had 10~ moderately balanced races.

I also had a game where there was an NPC undead legion that slowly expanded, and an NPC town that tried to fight it. Players played as disenfranchised peasants, who left the NPC town in order to start a new one. Players would pretty much play a normal RTS, allying/fighting/building/Questing where they saw fit, however, one of the players was actually a thrall to the undead legion (secretely). After some time, the undead player would start gaining powers, such as the ability to control the undead's actions based on a decision engine. Eventually he could convert his base to undead-ish structures and start an open war.

Lastly, I had an AOS that was going to be a sequel to the first that relied on having Jobs specific for each hero. For example an alchemist based character was able to hire a boat/go to an island where they could harvest herbs to make potions for his minions. This was in an early state, though.

I have a LOT of code I've lost throughout the years, but those are the only ones I can even remember. The others were coded poorly/too incomplete.

I have abandoned a lot of projects, which ended up collecting dust THAN inadvertently getting deleted .

I lost 10-15 years worth of projects due to both my main and backup HDs failing simultaneously. I store a copy of everything online now.

out of the 3 dozen or so games i've done since 1988, i have some of the source for caveman 1.0 from 2000, and that's it.

i once lost the pascal source code to SIMTrek in the middle of the project due to a cross liked file and had to search through a 6 meg recovery file for the word "procedure" to recreate the source code.

I remember being devastated as a child when some game I was working on for my Amiga got lost because the floppy disk was corrupted, and I didn't have any backups. As bad as it was at the time, I'm glad to have learnt the lesson then before it happened to more serious stuff.

Much of my early Amiga stuff I did got lost in an episode when Windows 98 decided to trash my hard disk. Thankfully having learnt my lesson, the most important stuff (like University projects) was backed up on floppy disk, but the lack of even a CD writer meant I didn't have anywhere near a full backup (although using a combination of backup tools and grepping the hard disk from Linux meant I got some more stuff recovered). So although it wasn't anything I was actively working on at the time, it's a shame to have lost it.

These days I have automatic backups to a 2nd drive, regular manual back up to a USB stick that I keep on me all the time, occasional DVD backups, and anything significant gets regularly backed up to online Git repositories. I've never had a disk corruption/etc since then, though it's saved me on rare occasions due to accidental file deletions.

ETA: I also still have early Spectrum Basic programs, stored on 3" floppy disks that I have no hope of reading.

ETA: I also still have early Spectrum Basic programs, stored on 3" floppy disks that I have no hope of reading.

I went out and bought a bbc master 128k to get around this problem, and enhanced it with a modern day usb system and ethernet card. I managed to save a few of my early programs this waythat i had sent to public domain libraries, but none of my games :( in the end enhancing a computer from 1984 to talk to a windows network and usb disk cost me quite a bit, but I think it was worth it...

Before source control and all that jazz, yes, I did lose one particularly advanced project. To this day, I can remember most of the features, but the content eludes me, and I ache.

It's been haunting me sporadically over the last 15 or so years...