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Exodemon, a fast paced first person shooter that recently released on Steam has an unfortunate history with some code being lost. The good news is some has been recovered and work continues, with a Linux version possible again.

It release on Steam on August 3rd and it came without the previously confirmed Linux version. I was aware of what happened after chatting to the developer previously, but waited until they said something more public on it. Now they have, with an announcement posted:

[…] As we mentioned in the last update, we've lost the project one year ago and had to rely on a decompiled version of Exodemon to finish development.

Today, we're very happy to announce we were able to recover part of the project, which we believed to be impossible! Now, we can once again edit the game in the Unity editor. […]

They've got a lot of work ahead of them, to fix up everything in the project and get it properly working again. The good news though, is that in that announcement they also mentioned that this will allow them to make new builds again, including one for Linux.

Before people start screaming "use version control!", the developer actually was. The problem, is that with the Unity game engine if you're using an external version control system you need to ensure that the .meta files Unity generates are visible. Without them, things can get pretty badly broken. As the Unity docs state "in the case of a texture asset losing its .meta file, any Materials which used that Texture will now have no reference to that texture" and "In the case of a script asset losing its .meta file, any Game Objects or Prefabs which had that script assigned would end up with an “unassigned script” component, and would lose their functionality".

The developer said on Twitter, that at some point they stopped including the .meta files from commits around a year ago and when they went to reverse something, everything went "boom". They managed to release on Steam, partly thanks to tools that allow you to inject code into a Unity build. Such tools, the developer said, "[…] are usually used to hack games or steal projects for reskinning, now I'm grad they exist […]".

Sounds like a rough time, glad to see they didn't give up. They certainly went through some big hoops to actually get their game out there.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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3 comments

dpanter Aug 7, 2019
The amount of bugs and problems with Unity never ceases to amaze.
Good to hear they managed to salvage the project!

The Steam price is very fair, also on 10% sale at the moment for a low cost of just above 5€.
cprn Aug 7, 2019
It's a devrant material. Also, we're missing a facepalm smiley here.
Nezchan Aug 7, 2019
The dev also seems to be selling it on Itch. There's also an old demo that runs on Linux still available.

https://kuupu.itch.io/exodemon
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