Monday Update #52 | A little story

Todays Monday Update will be a little bit different. While I can definitely report on some decent progress something happened. Something that kinda sucked. You don't have to worry though, everything is back to normal now, still I want to tell you how my last week went and why I didn't manage to develop as much as I wanted to. To properly tell the story I will give you some background.

My PC is old or at least it was. I bought it when I was 15(I think) with the money I earned washing dishes over the summer. 1500€. A shitton of money (At least for me). Understandably the parts I bought back then were good, and they held up for quite a while. But I needed to replace them sooner or later and I did so over the past two years with the money from this very Patreon. A new motherboard, CPU, GPU (When you could still buy them), new RAM, a new CPU fan, a new harddrive. Only the PSU stayed and the old case. And the latter is the culprit of this story. My case...

The case sucked. I was young and wanted shiny lights and cool looks more than functionality. The case is cramped and gets insanely hot. Especially in the summer. Too hot to be precise and my PC overheated more than once while rendering. So I decided to get a new case, one with good benchmarks and lots of space.

The case arrived and it works perfectly. It is much cooler in there already and I am not afraid of the summer anymore. Now I am really happy about the purchase, but before that something stupid happened. It happened while I changed the case. I am not an expert when it comes to PC's but I am not completely clueless either. I never had to assemble a PC from scratch, but I was sure that I could do it. So I took everything out of the old case and put it back into the new. Basically just looking at the cables and searching the motherboard for a slot where they fit. It usually works out and it did this time too. I tested the PC, powered it up and everything worked fine. At first.

Everyone knows that you aren't supposed to turn a PC off by the power button. But lets be honest here, in practice it just happens sometimes. The machine crashes or you wanted to change something in the BIOS and missed the button input, things like that. When I simply wanted to see if I had assembled everything correctly, I only plugged in the power and the screen to see if it works. It did, but I didn't have the mouse attached to shut it down. I was way too lazy to crawl back under the desk and attach my mouse. So I pressed the power button. And somehow, in that moment it actually happened.

My harddrive got corrupted. I booted the thing back up and suddenly windows wanted to start repairing the drive. I didn't know this particular error, but I am aware that most of windows automatic processes take ages and never work. And I wasn't confident in my PC assembling skills. I was convinced that I had messed up somehow while tidying up the cables and all of that. So I tested, and rebooted and tested. Now I know that I should have just googled from the start, but I was very convinced to know what the problem is. I kinda fucked up and with every reboot my harddrive probably got even more broken than before.

So my drive broke down. I couldn't even reset windows anymore. I do regular backups, but the last one had been at the beginning of march because I got careless. I got a lot of work done in that time. So I wasn't going to delete everything just to get it running again. Instead I went to amazon and bought a new drive. You can't believe how lucky I felt to be able to just buy a new SSD on the spot, which is thanks to your support. But I got the drive, I installed windows and all my lost programms and I even managed to access the files on the broken drive and recover them.

I got everything back. I came off easy with a huge fucking scare and, the point of why I am telling this story, I lost a lot of time. Getting everything back and running took me 3 whole days. Time I had planned to use on the game. So I didn't get as much done as I wanted to, but I didn't lose anything either. I also don't think it will be a big deal in the long run, it just means I have to put in some extra hours in the following weeks. That said, here is the actual Monday Update part.

Everything new:

• The new area is basically finished. With all assets and rooms that will be seen in 0.7.
• I started writing the dialogue.
• And for the dialogue I made the first animations. Mostly of the exploration in the new area.
• And I finished the first scene of the update. Completely rendered and animated from start to finish. You can see a little bit of it on my Discord if you are interested.
• I also made some new music for the new area. Until now I always used premade tracks from the internet, but this time I used some samples and ambiance sounds to make my own track.
• I fixed another set of typos.
• And made a very, very small change to the UI.

That is it. I already told you everything else that happened so you'll hear from me in the next post. I am feeling good and the progress will come, now that everything works again.

Stay safe, have fun!