

When Indie game development gets a black eye - primesuspect
http://gaming.icrontic.com/article/project-zomboid-giving-indie-gaming-a-black-eye/

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Samuel_Michon
The Holy Trinity of Making Backups:

1) If it's not automated, _it's not a real backup_.

2) If it's not redundant, _it's not a real backup_.

3) If it's not regularly rotated off-site, _it's not a real backup_.

Doing any one of these things by itself or in tandem produces "a copy." A copy
is handy, and it may really save you, even a majority of the time. But, making
casual copies is optimistic at best. Someday, you will need the benefits of
all three layers.

[http://www.43folders.com/2010/03/15/yes-another-backup-
lectu...](http://www.43folders.com/2010/03/15/yes-another-backup-lecture)

~~~
patio11
You also probably want backups to be tested. Many people, myself included,
have been bitten by "I did not quite have what I needed to bring the
production environment up again."

With regards to coders specifically: git and similar DVCSes is a lifesaver. If
you have a sensible push workflow, loss of a laptop only costs you the laptop,
the time it takes you to get a new machine to the state where you are
productive (+), and whatever your average not-pushed-to-somewhere batch size
is.

\+ Having recent experience with this, Ninite + Dropbox + a monthly backup of
my Ubuntu VM (where dev happens) in Dropbox = total recovery time was about
three hours.

~~~
kabdib
These days I freeze development environments by

\- checking in the tools, as well as the sources

\- running them in a VM, and backing /that/ up

\- ensuring that none of the tools, certificates, etc. will expire

Gigabytes are cheap.

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jeff18
It's not like when you are constructing a house and a tornado happens to knock
out months of your hard work. Programming is less like laboriously laying
thousands of bricks, but more like very carefully laying a small handful of
bricks in just the right places after a lot of thought.

I have a feeling that as they start re-developing what they have lost, they
will find that the work goes 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than it went when
they originally did it and in just a few weeks they will be caught up.

I think the way that they are handling it (treating it as pretty much a
project ending blow) is pretty questionable.

~~~
kabdib
I once lost two weeks of work with an "rm -rf" typo. No backups, just gone. It
was the 80s, and I had been careless.

Took me about a day and a half to re-create the work, and it was /better/.

I'm not saying it's a good thing to lose work this way. But it's seldom
utterly catastrophic. (Exceptions like "the SourceSafe database and build
machine start pushing up daisies the night before Final" . . . well, for one
thing: Don't use SourceSafe, and for Pete's sake, make sure your backups
actually work).

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patio11
Both gamers and gamers with programming chops have grossly unrealistic
expectations for how software development actually works.

~~~
eogas
Can you expand on this thought?

~~~
patio11
Gamers don't know that projects fail _all the time_ even with millions
invested in them, that 2,000 donations of $10 each is _not a large amount of
money_ , that amateur artists do not on average have habits which resemble
teams at megacorps, etc.

Devs don't understand that gamers are the worst customers on the face of the
earth, that for the price of an expresso they think you have an obligation to
listen to their entitled whining for _years_ , that the community they
participate in and value belonging to is frequently a toxic cesspool of
humanity, and that being an indie developer is approximately ~10% or so about
making video games. (The other 90% is marketing, customer support, community
management, marketing, accounting, marketing, taxes, marketing, hiring,
marketing, etc. Quite similar to selling bingo cards to elementary
schoolteachers.)

~~~
ismarc
I'm not sure about the feeling of entitlement. I think it's actually the
opposite. Until very recently, the video gaming scene was a game was done,
gold pressed, shipped and never touched again. No feedback, no updates, no
changes, so gamers would quite prominently voice their opinions. This had no
chance at all of affecting the current game but provided feedback on how to do
the NEXT game. This same method of voicing opinions has been carried over into
an environment where you can react to them and improve the game without a
change in tone. It also strongly falls into the fact that if people are
complaining about it, it means they care and you have customers.

------
wccrawford
I was just reading an anti-PayPal rant the other day (that I agreed with) and
someone was saying that this was the very reason that PayPal was holding the
pre-order funds for an indie developer. And here we are, with that exact
situation.

I think it's a pretty rare thing, but I can't blame PP for covering themselves
on this.

The developer -should- refund everyone's money if they aren't going to be able
to deliver. And if there's a major delay, they should offer the choice to the
customer.

But likely, they don't have the money, and it's just not an option.

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Sodaware
I don't agree that this will "send ripples through the Indie community for
years to come" as the article suggests. Perhaps people will be a little more
wary about putting up cash for a project on the the promise that it will be
finished one day, but that's about it. Independent games have been around a
lot longer than the last few years. A little drama from one project won't
upset anything.

~~~
Permit
At the very least it serves as justification for Paypal to not allow pre-
orders for an unfinished product. I'd never heard of this sort of incident
prior to this, but it just proves that Paypal and Google are right to protect
themselves from this sort of problem.

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drivingmenuts
First I've ever even heard of the project. While it may have been popular, and
a lot of OTHER people might have heard of it, indie games are all over the
place and I doubt this will have much of an effect on the overall market.

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KingOfB
Wow, what a douchy site. Guess this is the tabloid for the indie world?

protip: When life sucks act perfectly.

The guy had his baby killed and these guys ream out the way he responds. He
was working on making something that people enjoyed. Hearing people on the
sideline, put that much effort into making him wrong strictly pisses me off.

There are risks in paying an indie for a game before he delivers - wow that's
a shocking conclusion.

Feel bad for the developer, that's a kick to the nuts I hope I never
experience.

