Hi everybody!
I’m a father of a thirteen-year-old boy and if I’m writing here is because he’s -bitterly- crying on his bed right now.
He’s been making a game for the last five or six months and something strange happened yesterday to his GAME.gdg and GAME.gdg.autosave files. Both them have a size (~600 KB) but I’ve found out they are actually populated by ‘null’ characters, so they are completely lost. As you surely have guessed, my son hasn’t taken the precaution of making frequent backup copies despite my not so wise pieces of advice… He’s just recovered an old autosave file and there’s a lot of work to do from it. Well, my question is, is there a way to get the game script from a recent build folder he’s got? Or should I stop trying and let him learn the hard lesson…?
So sad, I know how it feels, I lost a lot of files and backups because a hard disk failure (sudden death), and previously I had deleted by accident a little server I have in another PC with more backups Luckily another PC had an old version, but already very advanced actually…
In Windows (I’m checking right now that there is something similar in Linux and OSX), the OS save (at its own criteria hehe) a backup of files/folders ocasionally, in my PC many folders has backups but just some files, so check the folder.
To check if the folder has a backup, do a right click over the folder of the project, and select “Properties”, then go to the tab “Previous Versions”, if a backup/previous version exists, it will be listed there, more about it here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17119/windows-7-recover-lost-deleted-files
It ca be very powerful, some time ago my brother installed a game but in the wrong folder, the game files where all loose on the “Saved Games” folder, so I told him to uninstall it to re-install at the right location. The uninstaller was not developed by NASA engineers, so it just deleted the entire game installation folder, 300Gb of games lost. But the “previous versions” did the trick and recovered each byte, hope it help you
EDIT: If you found a backup (I hope so), copy your current project folder first, because restoring the backup could delete new files added to the folder, as images and sounds
The native game build contains some parts of the project file. However, the project file in it is severely stripped. For example, the events are not stored inside as they are compiled in another file. There are only the objects and the layouts (and how the objects are placed on them). So, I doubt it will help you that much.
I’ve tried this Windows hint but unfortunately no previous versions were stored… I’ve looked into some temp folders too but found nothing related. And I was afraid that the build folder was not a chance. Anyway, it seems that my son is committed to start again (as the images, music, etc are save) and maybe improving some stuff he was no satisfied with. When the going gets tough… And, he will automatize a couple of weekly backups too.
Luckily another PC had an old version, but already very advanced actually…
