Here is the new entry in Nordenfelt‘s weekly development log.

You can help getting this project done, test Nordenfelt’s latest versions and discuss the game in the secret development forum with other preorderers by preordering Nordenfelt. If you like to stay in touch, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, email newsletter or listen to my tweets at @black_golem.

OK, enough calls to action. Let’s see what happened since last Wednesday.

Released 0.5.2

The draft version of level 2 and the revised ingame shop where installed in Nordenfelt’s new version 0.5.2. I’ve already showed you some screenshots from the second level last week. Here is a screenshot of the new shop:

screenshot ingame shop v2

It looks a little empty at the moment. That’s because there are just three pieces of equipment to buy yet. More will come along with gameplay refinement.

Your Project Can Die Any Day

This Monday I was happily working away when my virus scanner started its regular update. Suddenly it bleeped, showed me a virus and the fun started: the shortcuts on my desktop, in my quick launch bar and my programs started to disappear. Dozens of dialogs popped up, telling me that my harddisk is massively corrupted. As you can imagine I was shocked. What if this beast deletes my project files? I backup my Subversion repositories regularly but there are always some development files not included, e.g. large Gimp or Blender files.

Rebooting in Windows’ Safe Mode stopped my cold sweat. At least there was a way to access the machine without triggering the virus again. Two hours of forum search (on my dad’s prehistoric PC which loves to crash randomly) made it clear: it’s all right, just easily fixable malware. One hour later everything was repaired and I headed to the city for a new 2TB external backup storage. No more fiddling around with partial backups due to lack of disk space. From now on I’m backing up ALL DRIVES as they are. Making images would be an even better solution but I did not investigate image software yet.

To make a long story short:

A virus can kill your project IMMEDIATELY. When was YOUR last backup?

That’s it for this week.

As mentioned before, feel free to support the project by preordering Nordenfelt. Many thanks to all the people who already bought the game. You’re awesome!

Cheers,
Thomas