The Indie Stone is burgled, loses code for latest Project Zomboid update

@JoeBruin
Aaaaaaaaand this is why you *always* use source-control.

Seriously, they're renting a VPN for their site already. Setting up SVN is trivial, and is something they should do not just for backups but to make working on a multi-person project manageable. I cannot fathom why they wouldn't have done this.

@Nordoyle

I'm starting to think they're just making it up. They didn't have a backup externally?

@Balthier
When you're working out of your home on a game you don't tend to make back ups as often as you'd think. When you're working professionally or else where, then yeah you tend to. It's pretty common for bedroom devs to forget this step. Besides if he backed it up on an external HDD it more then likely could've been stolen too. If he uploaded it upto a cloud server or something people could've hacked it and stolen it as bedroom devs can't pay for the most secure of services.

When you're working out of the comfort of your own home, and with as much security as his had, you don't expect to be broken into and have your stuff stolen. Anything he could've backed it upto short of a flash drive he has with him at all times would've been stolen in that robbery. The flash drive could be stolen any time by someone picking his pocket.

@The Aquacharger

I don't buy that, home or not, they were working on a professional project that had a community backing. It's Game Development 101 to keep back-ups, etc... (hell, this is shit we learn in HS and College, even for things as silly as an essay for class).

I work on game projects both with colleagues / friends, as well as myself, and I always have back-ups, whether it's on some sort of Cloud Storage (like Amazon / Dropbox), or external hard-drives, etc...

Honestly, when I look at this from a professional perspective, all I can think of is a complete lack of foresight, organization and management. Also does not instill a lot of faith in me as a consumer.

It sucks, I can totally understand losing work, but man, something this big, they better learn from this lesson and pick up the slack. :P

@The Aquacharger

Lastly, you shift the argument to the ease of stealing, but that counterpoint has no relevancy here, due to general unlikelihood.

Unless these guys had the most terrible luck in the world, I HIGHLY doubt, and would bet money on it, that there would be NO possible way that a back-up on an External Drive, Cloud Storage, SVN Revision Control, Web Hosting, Flash Drive, etc... could have all been stolen at the exactly same time.

1) Cloud Storage / Version Control / Web Hosting, etc... are all online hosted and stored. There was no way thieves would go after it unless they were specifically aiming for it. (Doesn't seem like the case, and even then, you have enough of a time that you would be able to recover files, as services like Version Control keep their own back-ups for you.

2) External Drive / Flash Drive, etc... Keep multiple backups on several different drives. Unless they went for ALL of them, yeah I highly doubt someone's going to try to pick your pocket for a Flash Drive. That's just a silly thing to even mention.

In general, this had nothing to do with their laziness of being home, or their sense of security. It was their lack of preparedness and organization period.

Don't try to come up with excuses for people. They need to learn from their mistakes, and honestly, suffer for their incompetence.

@(Unverified)
Their cloud server actually recently got hacked and the game was uploaded to the pirate bay, so yes they do have the worst luck.
Also they're not a professional game studio. They are people making a game in their bedrooms. Just because they got people to donate to the game doesn't mean they're professionals or actually financially backed. Hell a dollar donation from 20 people doesn't automatically mean you need to buy a cloud server and treat it like you're an AAA studio.

@mylittlepwny
And yet Notch still gets away with this.

@Jennacide

@Jennacide
Oops. Anyway, at least Notch hasn't pulled a screw-up of THIS proportion.

@mylittlepwny These people paid for a product and received it. There was no binding contract that implied anything would come afterwards. People on reddit giving them no sympathy are entitled selfish assholes, much like yourself.

@ezraindustries It wasn't implied that anything would come afterwards? You are an idiot.

@Stumblebee

That's a little unfair. Something like this could happen to anyone. This time it happened to be an indie game developer.

Yes, they should have been making off site backups, but you can't blame them for being robbed.

@Jennacide Gets away with what? Apart from Minecraft being the spawn of Satan, Notch has never done anything that wrong. All the criticism from the 'community' has been total BS from the worst kind of entitled idiot.

@Dick Socrates
Never done anything wrong? Are you serious? He entered a 'beta' phase without actually knowing what that entails, while outright stating on Twitter multiple times that he was going to be adding more functionality and ignoring all bugs until the last second. That is NOT WHAT BETA PHASE IS.

Or how about trying to justify that Minecraft is the least optimized game in existance by saying it was a "design decision?" Yes, clearly x-ray skin packs for griefers to abuse was a design decision. Or the fact that the game has a giant gaping memory leak because of this, unrivaled by no game other than heavily modded Oblivion.

The entitled idiots are the ones that wanted him to update faster. I want him to make it ACTUALLY RUN WORTH SHIT.

@Jennacide
It'd help too if he got off Java. Getting rid of a virtual machine will do that.

@The Aquacharger
Well that's a whole other story my hatred of Java. But the game would run fine if he's just optimize the code to actually use line of sight instead of rendering EVERYTHING within your draw distance setting and never purging chunks when you leave them. For a game that looks as simplistic as Minecraft it's inexcusably it runs worse than every AAA game to come out this year.

Also I like how my comments are being downvoted, as if making them invisible will make me any less right. Minecraft is a great concept, with a horrible lead programmer.

@Jennacide

They should have said they took vacations. Works every time.

@Da Largest I can understand why people are angry. Even though I'm upset that they were burgled, it's an incredibly unprofessional move not to have such a large project externally backed up in any shape or form.

@JamesBE

"Unless you've never made a dumb mistake then you should STFU already." John 8:7 (Internet Comment Standard Version)

@MasterYogurt
You like writing, but not apparently reading.

Because they've said repeatedly that they did back up their code, it was just between the computers that the burglar stole. They were prepared against hard drives failing, not some dude breaking into an apartment that as far as they knew was very secure and taking everything.

And I honestly have to laugh at your "I back up my papers that are few pages long sending it by e-mail". No programming experience, I see? Because programs are FAR longer in sheer size than any essay people write. We're talking 10s of thousands of lines here, across dozens of files.

External backup is still obviously possible, using repositories and what have you. But it's not as trivial as backing up a paper for college, for chrissake. And they DID use back-ups, just not against burglarly and honestly, who thinks about burglary?

@PointlessPuppies

Oh wow, they backed it up onto two whole computers!

That's a terrible way to back up data. Why they didn't use an online repository is beyond me, that would've been one of the first things I did once I started accepting money from people. How did they not think to do this? Oh right, there was no thought involved.

Yes, as far as I know they probably worked very hard on programming the game by themselves, but when something like this happens, it's not surprising to hear people throwing the word "scam" out there. I'm more inclined to believe it can just be chalked up to stupidity though.

@PointlessPuppies Just about anyone with professional experience thinks about burglary. Even a small company like the one I work for requires encryption for laptops and off-site backups of our database.

@PointlessPuppies

Yes, I expect them to email programs to themselves. You taking THAT away from my comment reflects upon your own reading abilities.

Any reasonably responsible person goes through pains to make sure that their work stays secure and safe. For me, that's mailing files to myself and uploading them to Google Docs, and sometimes printing hard copies. For a carpentry company, that's covering materials with tarps to protect from weather damage. For a car lot, that's blocking the entrance and keeping keys stored in a very safe place. For museums, that's keeping guards on staff. See, everyone takes precautions against this sort of thing.

Losing a week of dev build is one discussion. Losing six months is absolutely absurd and completely irresponsible. There are tons of sites willing to provide backup space for large files, many for very, very, very cheap or even free, and there are ways to auto-backup folders on your HD without even copying things over. Most teams would even have a secure, private server with this sort of thing so they could access it remotely. For a smaller company, even something like DropBox could work.

There's plenty more than burglary that could have gone wrong. Fire, water damage, or a concurrent crash (what if a bug in the code caused some sort of HD write error that borked it and they both ran the program concurrently?) One backup is not enough, especially when that's stored in the same darn apartment.

Honestly, I find it hard to believe that only one backup of this existed. Didn't they buy a mac to code on that, and complained on the internet about people complaining about their development speed? They didn't at least copy the code to it to see if they could run it? Or WAS that the spare computer? I'm actually fairly partial to the "we can't deliver, say there was a robbery" theory, because that's actually more flattering to the devs. To think that they were so stupid and irresponsible as this is almost impossible. This isn't your grandma, these are people who KNOW that computers have issues sometimes and who are getting FUNDED by INVESTORS to make a game (hence a milestone meeting), ie. computer-savvy adults. Either they're liars or idiots beyond compare.

@ColorblindMonk

You feel bad for them getting slack? It seems like they're catching flak more than they're being given slack.

@TheBrainninja
Maybe that's the word I was looking for.

@Zamzoph

I think the problem was drink, shock of the situation and probably a healthy dose of remembering the abuse received in the past. To me that spells out letting your customers know ASAP to show them you're being open.

Problem is, people are horrible pricks and most expect to be spoon fed any information in some emotionless PR speak. The tragedy here is that yet another developer is going to withdraw from communicating with their playerbase.

@liquidsoap89

A *MILLION* times...

Stupid auto text!

@(Unverified)
Yet its those people who won't roll over and be ****ed by "project 10 dollars", and those people who will hopefully get the whole thing removed at some point.

No. You need people like that to avoid being scammed by horrible companies. I don't even believe that studio. In my student years I used to code websites (mostly Flash) for medium-sized companies.
Know what I bought when my first paycheck turned up? A backup system, local and online. Twice a day files would be backed up automatically. I was just a small site coder but I did what I had to do.

These people took YOUR money (since I never have or will pay them a dollar) and didn't do things they should have. Instead they go out spending YOUR money on clubbing without reinforcing their company. These are not people I can trust.

@(Unverified)

You're clearly clueless.

I guess you was also behind people complaining to Paypal and Google which caused all the payment issues because there was no product? Did you also support pirating the game because you felt ripped off or entitled to try it before paying despite the costs it imposed on the developer?

Basically it's people like you that are the problem. Your feeling that paying any amount of money entitles you to be outraged for any reason you see fit. Again, short of delays in development (like major studios don't do this too) what else have these guys done to betray the trust of anyone who paid them money?

@Sockdog

And of course that was meant for Undulation not Unverified.

@(Unverified)

Thank goodness Reddit isn't *the* gaming community. I still have faith in the community; especially when I come to Joystiq and see comments that have rightfully become blue.