Status Report

Well, I have a concerning status report for you all. I hate sharing this but it's what's going on in my life and you deserve to know.

tl;dr: My primary hard drive failed, which contained a massive amount of LLRR's work. The visual novel itself is safe, including the recent Samantha stuff I've written and added, but most the blender files are not. The fate of these files is in the hands of data recovery professionals now. No matter what happens, I can continue to work on LLRR with what I have, and I will.

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So, last Thursday I returned home from a trip, and discovered that my computer would not boot up. I proceeded to spend the entire evening and all of the following day trying to get it to work. Here's the facts:

My primary hard drive failed. This contained LLRR, all the blender files I used to work on it, and lots of other unrelated shit I'd worked on.

Was any of that backed up? Yes, but only a small fraction, because I'm an idiot who didn't back everything up. You should take this as your cue right now to remember that your harddrive has a limited number of uses remaining and it WILL fail someday, so back up your shit!
I just so happened to put LLRR on my external harddrive to take with me on the trip so that I could work on it while I was away. So the current most up-to-date copy of the game with the new Samantha update stuff is safe! However, there's some notable work I hadn't gotten around to slotting in yet (for example, that climaxing Kelly animation I made recently, which I had intended to convert to a Samantha version to use, among other things).

I have a .blend file of all the characters backed up, though I don't think it has the wedding dresses or bikinis. I have Stella's house, which is the most important environment.
But over 90% of the blender files related to LLRR are just unavailable to me now. This includes Samantha's recent animations, though the final product of all those animations is in the game already, thankfully.

Now, all is not yet lost.

I took the hard drive into a data recovery service yesterday. It really sucks to do that, because the common price range for that kind of service is around $300-500. It's going to take them a few days to tell me how much it'll cost and what data they can get off of there, and a few more days to actually do it. I have no guarantee that the data is safe. I don't even have a guarantee that I'll be able to afford the price they quote me.

The fact is, I was planning on starting over once I finished LLRR anyway, but I wasn't exactly ready for that to happen yet.

Also, I need a new computer, which thankfully my parents are helping me get and should be ready on Sunday. On the bright side, this thing should be a big step up in terms of rendering speed which will make my work easier. But for now, the computer I'm using is running on the secondary drive, which didn't fail, but blue-screened the other day.

Suffice to say I've been very stressed out the past few days, a bundle of nerves.

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I'm telling you all this because the results of the data recovery are going to have a very real impact on LLRR. If that data is lost (or if the recovery turns out to just be far too expensive), then I'm going to have to accelerate things and move forward. I'm still going to be able to work on LLRR, because I still have the character files and the house and my raw fucking skill, but my mentality may need to shift to "cut to the chase" mode, so to speak.

Unless I can recover the data, in which case everything will be completely fine and return to normal, except for the rest of my life I'm gonna be a guy who backs up his data, haha.

I'm really sorry about this. It's been on my mind that I should back everything up, but these Blender files get really large (it's hundreds of total gigabytes at this point), so it was a hassle that I just kept putting off.

I will keep you updated on what's going on.