Bring Out Your Dead
· Skid Vis
Back in 2020, at the peak of.. well.. you know, I was accepted into Meta’s Launchpad program. It was a Meta bootcamp for teaching people how to get into making VR games on the Quest. They provided headsets, swag, a discord community, and several video calls discussing the ins and out of development, marketing, the review process, and so on.
It was a good time. (So good that I applied again in 2021 and got in.) As a part of launchpad, we had to make a VR project in order to put what we learned to use. I made a little project I called DemBows.
Now, if you’re familiar with Reggaeton artists like Daddy Yankee or Bad Bunny, that style of music is based on a Reggae song called “Dem Bow,” and in my game you have a bow. In the game you basically navigate mazes trying to find all the targets as fast as possible. Naturally, the music would be reggaeton.
Not groundbreaking, but it was my first project so I kept it simple.
A few days ago a friend of mine reached out and said,
“I was watching my gameplay video of your game DemBows, such a good game! Ever plan to do anything further with it?”
I was like, really? Luckily, I still had it loaded on my headset, so I fired it up and tried it out. It was pretty fun! Low stakes and relaxing. I played through all seven levels I had made. I wondered how hard it would be to modernize the source code to bring it up to date.
Sadly.. I deleted the source code. I’ve replaced my hard drive since I made it, and stopped paying Github for large files, so it was deleted there too. The only thing I have is two apk’s. An earlier, unsigned demo and the latest signed apk on Meta’s Developer Hub.
I pulled them both into a folder and fired up Claude. I said,
“Claude.. I lost the source code to this game, can you help me recover it?”
I thought it would hit the brakes and see it as some act of piracy, but to my surprise the response was more I got you, fam!
A few minutes later it had extracted all the assets and scripts into backup folders. I then spun up a new Unity project, copied the files there, and told Claude to create a restore plan: updating the project to support most XR headsets, not just Quest.
Three Hours Later…
Just 3 short hours later and I was up and running. It didn’t just recover it, it improved it. I was flabbergasted. It’s no wonder there are so many stories popping up from indie devs about having their games stolen. All I had was 2 apk’s!
On the one hand, man, that’s terrifying; but on the other.. I have a graveyard filled with dozens of game ideas I fiddled with before they died. Now, with AI, I can resurrect those ideas, maybe even have Claude pick out something worth saving from all of them and create a new Frankenstein game that’s better, faster, stronger.
There’s never been a better time to..
