Ah Jesus F**cking Christ a virus wiped out my entire hard-drive this afternoon and before you could even say "System Recovery Software" the wife had gone ahead and wiped/reinstalled the lot by the time I'd gotten home from work.
Can't blame her, it was my own fault for downloading files from the wrong sorts of sites and BAM! couldn't even get into Safe Mode to stick my Flash files on a CD.
It wouldn't usually bother me much but I'd been working on The Damned again and had practically finished the entire game. I was literally days away from uploading it to the safety of the server.
Geez, Level 2 was looking brilliant. Not only did I have zombies with location damage all over their bodies - arms exploding, heads flying off at random angles and calculated velocities, but the magnum weapon was working well; enemies exploded into chunks of blood and guts at close range. Like a different game and much improved. The real killer is that I had painstakingly redesigned many of the 'death scenes', cutting footage from zombie movies out and adding my own little personal touches. Took weeks. Gameplay was far more exciting, the zombies came flying at you from out of the darkness but could be illuminated from a distance for a brief second with a round off the beretta. I'd also created a 'Salems Lot' style monster that crawled along the walls towards you following a circle radius. Ah man, they looked awesome but I don't have a single screenshot- it was all for naught. A labour of love, lost.
Fuck..
Not only that. An update of the SORF engine with enemy AI and extra moves. A prototype I had made for a potential remake of Green Beret, written in AS3. It was looking pretty sweet, had the guy running around the tile-engine and he would execute a slash Strider-style ie- as fast as you could hit the key.
Oh well, adapt, overcome. I'm pretty bitter but there's nothing like a clean slate to spur on the imagination.
I'm too down to go back to work on The Damned so for the time being I might get into the fighting-engine. I figure codewise it won't be the biggest stretch to get a decent little mini-game up and running in no time, so keep your eyes peeled here for that in the near future. Later dudes.