Quick downdate (wait, shouldn't that be upda-) (Patreon)

I don't want to write this, especially so close to the end of the month, just as much as you likely don't want to read this, but full disclosure because you all are graciously supporting me.

I was trying out a new Beta version of Auto Hand to see if I'd like it better for Cuddle Kobold. It's a little buggy, but has some of the features from other frameworks I like, so it's getting to be a strong contender when it previously was the least robust of the three. And in that process of testing, I did a fresh project, did the import but goofed up some of the settings. Frankly it was easier to start fresh at that point, so I made another new project, and shift-deleted AutoHandV2Beta-01 (which skips the recycle bin). Except, in that process, I indicated somehow (and I really didn't think I did!) to delete EVERYTHING in the parent directory.

This was my recent Unity projects directory.

When I noticed a few minutes later, I immediately ran Recuva, which did a bang-up job restoring a large portion of the directory, but Kobold was empty except for a single text file. But I have backups! Except the backup I'd recently made, before converting to the latest version of Unity, was kept in the same directory beside the working version, and for some reason the May backups I did, I must've gotten aggressive with clean-up as they're empty too. It was so jarring I briefly considered if someone had directly targeted me, but no, it was almost definitely human error.

It's not all nightmares. I have a backup from late April, and truth be told I hadn't made a lot of progress in June due to some personal matters going on (I've been getting the run-around trying to get assessed for something, and one of my family members briefly went into the hospital, but they're OK). The funny thing is I don't even have my working list of changes that I can reproduce, since it was in the same directory. (I did give the Kobold a basic idle animation, and had her worked out tracking the headset instead of just the hand, so eye contact was much better.) So what I'm going to instead do is start fresh with a cleaner project file, with the framework I'm choosing from the start. I'll use the old project file for reference for things like the Kobold size and general layout. Once I'm able to focus on it, I should be up-and-running again in a few days, better than it was before.

I'll also be learning how to use a Repository. I'd previously used one for a Game Jam or two, but the experience was awkward and rarely made sense for my small or early projects. I'd actually been thinking about it increasingly up to the night before, but these things tend to happen between you recognizing a problem and actually doing the thing to solve it. I've got to find one that doesn't mind hosting a mature project, though. But I'll get that sorted out.

Thanks for hanging with me through this, if you feel like doing so. One of my first panic points when this happened was how this was going to disappoint you all.