I accidentally renamed the QuestionSO and all the data in them was lost. Aside from this being infuriating (I hated wasting my time making questions the first time, I’m NOT doing it again) isn’t this a critical problem with Scriptable Objects? If the data is so vulnerable to loss then surely ANYTHING is better to store data in.
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Welcome to GameDev Community!
Ummm…these things are going to happen, unfortunately. I cannot tell you how many GameDev game projects and Blender projects I’ve completed and they got lost due to HDD crashes, OS reloads, etc…
Honestly, I didn’t export them to my itch.io account because I felt they were too ‘generic’ and not very personalized, but last night I realized that over time, I had lost a heck of a portfolio without even realizing it. Even if the games were only based on the tutorials, it could have been enough to get me a job interview.
I sat down and made a list last night:
It can be frustrating, to say the least.
Some of it was my fault, some of it wasn’t. I was angry, too, but I’ve also found that going back to re-do the projects was much faster the second/third time around, and it really helped reinforce my knowledge and remind me of things I had forgotten.
I’m not trying to tell you how you should feel about it, but I can definitely relate.
If it makes you feel any better, I just restarted the Number Wizard game last night…the one from the old deprecated 2D course.
Writing code is a big part of game development, so I just try to enjoy the process of writing code and watching the tutorials.
This time around, I’ll be more cautious about exporting my finished and mostly finished projects to my itch.io account, but as for now, I have a lot of catching up to do.
I feel your pain, my duder. Keep your chin up! Your next game will be better!
I haven’t lost the project itself, only the contents of the Scriptable Objects. Your comments about maintainng are timely since getting proper archiving set up is something “I’ll get round to when I’m working on something worth saving” which is probably fine as long as I actually DO get round to it.
I’m frustrated here because this is already a bit of a nadir for my motivation. I know a decent amount about coding so I was hoping to skip to the intermediate lectures but found myself a bit lost in how Unity works. These tutorials are definitely helping but I’m not enthused by them and naturally the quiz is the least exciting topic. The stuff I’m learning about UI is definitely valuable but I was rather hoping there would be a few ready made questions so I didn’t have to bother and I definitely don’t want to bother again. It’s also frustrating because the tutor lead me to creating the questions ahead of when was necessary, which I gues was supposed to help with motivation but actually had the opposite impact.
Getting back to Scriptable Objects though I’m struggling to see their merit. Back in the day I’d have used code to read questions from a plain text file into an array. This would be vastly more robust, as well as vastly easier to edit. Before I knew what I was doing I’d have dumped the questions directly into the code and honestly I think THAT would still be a better method than Scriptable Objects. I’m actually planning on working on a card game and the idea of losing dozens and dozens of cards down to the slightest breeze, coupled with an editor less convenient than repeated card.cardName[72]=“Dramatic Reversal” is. Well it’s enough motivation to write a program to pull data from a plain text file.
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Sure, I agree, and these points all make sense.
One thing I can think to add it that most of these courses are written for the complete beginner, so these lessons on Scriptable Objects are a first for many of us.
You’ll see in some of the courses that the instructor might write something that doesn’t make sense to a professional or an experienced person, but the notion is often to demonstrate something simple to a beginner.
In many cases, the instructor will go back later and refactor the code to demonstrate how to refactor and make the code better. It’s very difficult to write a course that doesn’t leave a beginner behind.
So, yes, there will be some things that may seem like stumbling blocks, but there is often a follow-up to demonstrate a better practice.
As for the questions, well, I like your idea of keeping them in a text file. Even though the text file or other isn’t used in this course, it is still a good place to copy/paste from in the event of data loss.
I wrote all my QM questions down in a notebook for the same reason. I’ll have to type them all out again, but that was my choice for the way I chose to do it.
I wasn’t bothered about the lack of prepared questions in this course. I rather enjoyed the freedom to deviate and come up with my own questions. I think I made my quiz about ‘Interview Questions’, and my interview questions were all kind of off-the-wall stuff like, “Do you like Pizza or Tacos?”
Thankfully, you didn’t lose your whole game! That is definitely good to hear!