Indie Game Lunch Hour Always Backup Your Game
Dec 24, 2025
Jacob Kaczynski, a rising indie game developer known for his game Constellar, shares his journey from Scratch to Godot. He emphasizes the critical importance of backups, recounting a harrowing loss due to hardware failure that reshaped his approach. Jacob discusses his layered backup strategy using Git and practical advice for budding developers. He explores gameplay mechanics involving elemental combos in Constellar, and offers insights on indie studio growth while navigating the evolving landscape of game development with AI.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Dev Build Destroyed By Hardware Failure
- Jacob lost his development progress when his motherboard shorted and BitLocker encrypted his drive without a password.
- He had to wipe the drive and rebuild, which taught him to back up everywhere afterward.
Make Source Control Your Primary Backup
- Use Git or another source control as your primary backup and push regularly.
- A repository that you push to often prevents catastrophic data loss.
Back Up To Multiple Places
- Spread backups across devices and cloud providers rather than relying on one machine.
- Jacob stores his project on laptop, school laptop, home PC, Google Drive, OneDrive and GitHub to avoid single-point failures.