Disaster... (Patreon)

I'm gonna keep this short because I feel like absolute crap right now.

A few days ago, one of my hard drives decided to just die on me. Thankfully—by the power of friendship—it wasn’t my Honey Select 2 drive, which holds all my in-game work: character cards, designs, renders, Ren'Py scripts, and coding.

So, phew, right? Nope. Not even close. What I lost was just as bad—if not worse. My Unity/DAZ3D drive, the one with all my custom mods and assets for the games, is gone. We’re talking nearly 1 terabyte of stuff I’ve collected, built, and poured my soul into over the last four years. Not just my own work, but also assets and mods I created for other devs I’ve helped along the way.

"But Nii! Don’t you back up your stuff?!"I do—for my HS2 drive, which alone takes up 2 terabytes, maxing out my external backup. But this? I never saw it coming. That drive was barely a year old, showed zero signs of failure, and then bam—I boot up my PC, it freezes, and suddenly, BIOS doesn’t even recognize the drive anymore.

At first, I thought it was my OS drive, which wouldn’t have been a big deal since it’s nearly three years old and doesn’t hold anything important. But nah, of course not—it had to be one of my newest drives, one of the two that mattered most.

I tried every trick in the book to recover my data, but nothing worked. Sure, I could take it to a data recovery company, but the cost is insane. At that point, it’s just not worth it.

Now, I’m stuck with a mountain of work. Tons of assets still need to be ported for the next update, and to top it off, I have to rebuild my entire modding tool from scratch. Some purchased assets can be redownloaded, but the ones I made myself are forever GONE. And I have to somehow remember and track down all the tools I used.

Is this a setback? YES. A massive one. Not just for game development, but for my sanity. The sheer evil in me just wants to slam my head into a wall and scream.

Going back to the intro—I feel like absolute garbage. I don’t even know where to start rebuilding all of this.

And as for the update? I don’t know. I’m not in the right headspace to answer that right now. The good news? All my development progress is safe. The bad news? I need to drag myself out of this mess and somehow piece everything back together.

Right now, though? I’m just a pile of stress and regret.