My HDD got corrupted

So, the drive that I keep all of the Waifu Wonderland files got corrupted. I repaired the drive and seem to have gotten most of it back, but I did lose at least one big folder. The folder containing all of the character sketches, writing, and references for the lab storyline. It just disappeared. I even tried using a program to restore deleted files, and it doesn't show up there.

The most bizarre part, is that yesterday I saved some references to the folder, and they don't appear in my download list anymore. There's stuff in there from as far back as April, but these specific images aren't. The history of going to the sites is also gone.

So that's a real bummer. That's dozens of hours of work just kind of gone. Like it never existed at all.

On the bright side, I had moved Almiranda's files out of that folder already, so her scene and everything is still here. And the game itself seems to be okay. I've started a backup folder for the game files, just in case, but this hard drive is the only one big enough to fit all the references and everything I need on it. So I can't back up anything else really.

Since I have to start over anyway, I'm going to be reworking the whole idea. I originally was going to have it setup where doing experiments was like a sort of maze-like dungeon. Each individual girl would have a unique maze, and once you did all 6, that would finish the experiments, you'd get to seduce the scientist in charge of the experiment, and the machine would explode. Causing portals to open up around the city where demons and monsters would come through.

I've decided to streamline this a bit now. Instead of doing the 6 experiments and having to go through the dungeons and win all 6 boss battles for the portal machine to explode, that's just going to happen right away. Instead of the demons and monsters running rampant, only a select few will have crossed over. You'll be tasked with collecting all of the demons and monsters that came through and returning them to their own dimension. I'm still working through if I want to have it just be all women or not, how many you'll have to find to get to the next part of the story, and how it'll all play out.

Since I need to redo all of the sketches and designs, I'm also going to make them different than they were. For now, I'm going to only do very human looking ones. They were always pretty human, but like before there was one based on a butterfly. She was mostly human looking, but had black sclera, blue skin, a forked tongue, claws, and butterfly wings. But I'm going to shy away from more drastic designs like that. I'm just going to stick to stuff like catgirls or succubus like Almiranda. Basically just humans except with ears/horns and maybe a tail. I'll do at least one with a unnatural skin color too, but that's as far as it'll go. At least for the first part of the story. I may branch out a bit to more monster-like girls later on. Maybe even full-on monster girls. I want to make sure it's more optional though. The first part of the lab story is meant to help give players a big chunk of money early on, and I don't want people to feel forced into content they don't like to get to the parts that they do like. Especially at the start of the game.

So yeah, that happened. I wanted to mention it because of the rework, since everything I've said before about the lab storyline may not apply anymore. And also because it's added a lot more planning work that I need to do for v0.2. There wont be a delay or anything like that, but there's going to be less in v0.2 than I had initially planned because of it.

Also just to quickly mention, I'm on the testing stage for v0.1! I've ran into some smaller stuff I've missed, like a few lines weren't formatted right, and I forgot to make a couple of sprites. But nothing too crazy. Unless something goes horribly wrong, it's looking like it'll be released next weekend! I hope everyone is looking forward to it!