After a mishap losing code, the dev of Exodemon has recovered some making a Linux build possible

Exodemon, a fast paced first person shooter that recently released on Steam has an unfortunate history with some code being lost. The good news is some has been recovered and work continues, with a Linux version possible again.

It release on Steam on August 3rd and it came without the previously confirmed Linux version. I was aware of what happened after chatting to the developer previously, but waited until they said something more public on it. Now they have, with an announcement posted:

[…] As we mentioned in the last update, we've lost the project one year ago and had to rely on a decompiled version of Exodemon to finish development.

Today, we're very happy to announce we were able to recover part of the project, which we believed to be impossible! Now, we can once again edit the game in the Unity editor. […]

They've got a lot of work ahead of them, to fix up everything in the project and get it properly working again. The good news though, is that in that announcement they also mentioned that this will allow them to make new builds again, including one for Linux.

Before people start screaming "use version control!", the developer actually was. The problem, is that with the Unity game engine if you're using an external version control system you need to ensure that the .meta files Unity generates are visible. Without them, things can get pretty badly broken. As the Unity docs state "in the case of a texture asset losing its .meta file, any Materials which used that Texture will now have no reference to that texture" and "In the case of a script asset losing its .meta file, any Game Objects or Prefabs which had that script assigned would end up with an “unassigned script” component, and would lose their functionality".

The developer said on Twitter, that at some point they stopped including the .meta files from commits around a year ago and when they went to reverse something, everything went "boom". They managed to release on Steam, partly thanks to tools that allow you to inject code into a Unity build. Such tools, the developer said, "[…] are usually used to hack games or steal projects for reskinning, now I'm grad they exist […]".

Sounds like a rough time, glad to see they didn't give up. They certainly went through some big hoops to actually get their game out there.