Bad news. It's gone.

It's a shame that literal DAYS after I announce a new project, something goes awry. Let me tell you like it is.

Unfortunately, close to every piece of important data and script is gone for The Pen. It is all corrupt. I have no factual explanation as to why this happened, and, save for some generally nice folks on the RM forums who attempted to help me, I have no way to fix and/or recover any of it. In spite of what I don't know, allow me to explain what I do know to those interested.

Attached to this post is an image of a message I receive upon trying to access the game, replacing this specific file shown in the image only brings me to more corrupt files. Replacing them has not worked. Now, here is what I THINK happened:

According to the veteran devs of the RPG Maker on the forums, RPG Maker MV (The engine I use) is rarely, if ever, the cause of corruption, a fact I do not doubt. Corruption is mostly caused by outside and third-party programs interfering with the saving progress, or a failure to close the program properly while saving or

after saving. In my case, it could have been either one of these. I saved the program, and it said it completed the save, and then I closed it. Maybe something in the background wasn't done saving. Alternatively, maybe it was one of the background processes I had running and it interfered with the save. In any case, it doesn't matter now.

This will not be the last you see of The Pen. Obviously it can't come out on the 25th anymore, but it may still arrive this year. When things like this happen, because it hasn't and likely won't be the last time, I look forward and try not to sulk in the failure. I will rebuild the game, and it will be better this time. I apologize in turn for this. At the end of the day, there's no one or thing to blame but myself. I knew loss of data was a risk, and I still failed to back anything up. Shameful, me.

I'll keep you updated. Thank you for taking the time to read this. The Pen is not canceled.

-Wyatt "Doofus" Johnson