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Just had weird crash. Was working with AppGameKit and all of sudden Windows says something has gone wrong and will need to reboot. So I rebooted.
Went to start AppGameKit and just a white screen and says AppGameKit has stopped working. I had bought off of steam, so no big deal, just uninstall and reinstall. Same thing happens.
So I removed my project folder from my documents, and AppGameKit starts up. I go and put my projects back and AppGameKit fail.
Luckily when I am finished programming I copy the projects directory to another hard drive.

Turns out my main.agc got fried. Everything would have been gone, if I didn't keep a backup at another location.


-Brian

Sorry to hear about your troubles and glad you got it sorted!

Definitely always want to back up stuff you don't want to lose. I use git to commit to local repos and push over to my BitBucket account This way you get it out of your house entirely. I haven't done that much with it yet for my AppGameKit projects and this reminds me I need to push some more stuff over.

Anyway it is handy because you can set projects to be public or private. For example in my account I have several different projects that cannot be seen by others and I have one public project.

you can try opening main.agc in another editor (NotePad++), maybe you can recover the code that way, if it happens again

Always good practice to keep your Apps in one place, and your Data another. Personally what I do is set up another partition for data (and games) if on a laptop. On desktop, two physical drives at least. That way, the OS and Apps can happily reside on one partition - or disk - and Data on the other.

For backup many options exist. For quick, dirty and fully automatic, have your important data inside a Google Drive or Dropbox folder. Though for source-code, pushing to Github is better - assuming you do not mind your code being available for others to see and copy, or as Github is intended for, contribute to.

I took me some time to 'discover' Github as it were. At first it seemed a bit byzantine and, hmm, exposed. But once I got used to it, I can't really imagine any other way to store code. Version control is great - any change you do or blind alley you follow can always be undone easily when using Github. If stuck with anything, and need help, you can always include a little snippet of code in your help-post, and link to the github repo if anyone need see the complete context. It's there, and ready. Why not use it?

Also, for AppGameKit projects, you can always leave out pushing the media folder, so no-one can copy your project without at least putting in some effort - just edit the .gitignore file to include the line 'media/' and you're set. Probably a good idea to also add the line '*.exe' and similar for Mac or Linux depending on what OS you use so as to not push the executable to Github every time.

In other good news, working with Github is pretty much a required skill in any programming job, so if you got ambitions in that direction, might as well hop on board right away

@Dybing good stuff and I agree. Although definitely not a fanatic about it using source control in these remote repos is handy. I use BitBucket for my personal projects and on my job we use an internal Github server. But... both are git and work basically identical.

Definitely helpful to get experience with git etc for a person looking to get into a career as a developer.

One thing though... the repos can be set to be private or public so a person can definitely use these as just storage without publicly sharing the files. My BB account has only one public project on it and about 5 to 6 more that are private.

I thought you need a subscription or pro account to host private projects?

@PartTimeCoder not that I know of with BitBucket. When you create a project repo over there one of the fields along with name, description etc is whether it is public or private. So just choose private for the things you don't want to share publicly.

I actually do want to start putting all of my code over there in public projects for little experiments I do and so forth. Like the game jam template. I think that stuff... some of it anyway... will be helpful or at least interesting to some people.

Speaking of which I am finally back in a game dev mood again. I will work on it this weekend and throw what I have up on a BB project repo.

Kind of wanting to make a little 3D fps or adventure game now. Probably blocks but might make some simple low poly models for it. As long as graphics time is kept to a bare minimum that is what is important to me.

It's way too easy to waste all of a person's development time just jacking around with graphics stuff and never actually get any progress made on the actual game itself. lol I've seen many people fall into that trap on the Unity forum and I used to be the same years ago so I try hard to avoid that now.

On Github, free means anyone can see your code. To keep it private, you need subscribe.

If your code is just you messing around then why keep it private? Hell, even if not messing around, but doing something worthwhile, why keep it private?

A project that outgrows one person doing everything and need collaboration and some access control to make a commercial product - that is the point to make the repo private, unless one got some open source fetish. Either way, the repo owner decides what goes into production code.

That may be why I chose BitBucket. I know I checked out both of them to begin with and thought BitBucket was much better for my needs.

BitBucket makes no bones about it... unlimited private repos. Because the idea is more than just doing open source projects it is for backups, a remote team working on a project, etc.