Last week, news appeared on the Steam page for Quantum Lock, the 2015 cyberspace freeze tag asymmetric game first released by indie developer Fat Bomb Studios. The news was grim: Quantum Lock was a "major milestone," but the studio said it was "made before we understood version control software." Fat Bomb delisted Quantum Lock because the source code was lost within a few years of its release.

Without the source code, it is impossible to address any problems or bugs that players might discover in Quantum Lock, or worse, potential security vulnerabilities. We no longer have access to the source code and cannot make any fixes or changes to the game. 'For this reason, we have decided to allow anyone to purchase a copy of the game.'

Fat Bomb Studios co-founder Aaron Leaton was looking for inspiration when he returned to the studio's first game in eight years.

"The game had 10 concurrent users at its peak, most of whom were friends I had convinced to test the game. We fixed all the problems we encountered and had no outside bug reports." So we walked away from the game and didn't look back until this month, when we opened it up to gather art references for possible new maps for the new "Light Bearerrs 2."

Returning with another eight years of game development experience, Leaton said he found "a lot of problems that are now glaringly obvious." [problems] He couldn't fix them. "At the time Quantum Lock was developed, there was no established practice of backing up data other than storing it on portable hard drives. A few years after Quantum Lock's release, that portable hard drive was lost. We lacked the knowledge and resources to be able to store our data on a local server or in the cloud."

Today, Fat Bomb's version control solution has evolved to include a local Perforce server and additional backups in two separate locations; Leaton described the loss of Quantum Lock as "a He called it a victim of a "paradox.

With QuantumLock left permanently unfixable, Leaton made the rational decision to delist it on Steam so that people would not purchase a dangerous product. Leaton said, "We didn't want players from our other games to wander into this game and be met with disappointment."

Clearly, this earned complaints from self-described "avid collectors," who were discouraged by the Steam game's inability to add it to their library, even though almost no one had previously been interested in it. Leaton said, "We didn't expect the reaction from the closure at all."

Asked if he had any advice for other indie developers looking to release their first game, Leaton said that there are so many resources available in today's game development landscape that the version of himself that was developing Quantum Lock in 2015 "is unrecognizable It would be," he replied, a difficult question. Most important to Leaton is experience.

"Your first game is likely to be a disaster," he said. No one is good at it from the start." Game development is a skill that must be developed over time, through a healthy dose of failure."

Second most important, Leaton said, "Use Google Drive for backups."

Fat Bomb's next asymmetrical multiplayer game, Light Bearerrs 2, is scheduled for release in late 2024.