There have been 3 major occasions where I nearly lost over 1000 hours of work that I put into my game.

July 2023

When I was a child, I always wanted a computer that I could play games with. When I got my first few months of pay, I finally bought one. It had so many problems but it worked. A couple of years later, I started working on my game. 7 months after working on the game, my computer shut down and couldn't be turned back on. 

I sent it to get repaired and they told me they wouldn't be able to save all the data. Luckily for me, I read a book about unlucky things happening. Because of that book, I regularly save my game onto GitHub and a spare USB. When finally fixed, I redownloaded my game from GitHub onto Gdevelop.

September 2023

The second time I nearly lost my game was because I clicked the wrong button. I have all my game dialogue in one file. When I add new dialogue I usually click 'apply'. Then I started noticing that the dialogue wasn't showing up. I was confused. So I started testing some things out. Then I realised the issue is due to how GitHub works. I can't click apply like I did before using GitHub. I need to click save so that it overwrites the GitHub dialogue file. Looking back it seems obvious. But at the time it was a mystery.

Yesterday

Yesterday I logged into Gdevelop to work on my game. I've been working on a new update and was excited to finally release it.  When I clicked to test out recent changes, all objects got deleted. I tried again, and again all objects got deleted. 

This happened after a recent Gdevelop update. After doing some testing, I found out the issue might be linked to Gdevelop itself.

I've experienced many issues while working on this game and found a way out (still feels miraculous for someone with no coding experience). I thought to myself, "there's no way I can fix an issue related to the game engine itself." I wanted to give up -  "maybe I should make a different game, something easier. Maybe I should use a different game engine."

Then someone asked me - "what will you do if you make another game, or use a different engine and that company releases an update that breaks your game again? You've already come this far, why give up now?"

I went to bed with that thought, woke up the next day and had fresh ideas for how to overcome the problem.  One idea was using an older version of the game engine. Since it was an update that broke the game, the version before that should be fine. And that's what I did. Somehow its all fixed (fingers crossed).

Being a solo dev

Sometimes, working on a game alone feels isolating. When things go wrong I have to rely on myself. They're frustrating, puzzling and often stupidly simple issues.  Luckily I chose a game engine with a good community, but that community won't always have the answers. Yesterday might not be  the last time I nearly lost my game. But I'm having fun making Villainess LifeSim and want to see my vision come to life. 

So I write this for other solo devs to share my experience. Yes, it's important to know when to give up, but if it means a lot to you; and you know you'll regret It later, then keep going.