I Lost 100 Blocks and It Made CryptoBlocks Better

Last night I was building Pac-Man in CryptoBlocks. Not as a demo — as a real project. Procedural maze generation, Fisher-Yates shuffle, ghost AI, the whole thing. I was 300+ blocks deep.

Then I wiped my workspace by accident and lost 100 blocks.

The Moment

I’d been building for hours. The isRoom function was finally working — four conditions nested into AND blocks, returning a boolean. The shuffle was done. The grid generator was filling matrices with walls. I was in the zone.

Then I hit a key combination I shouldn’t have. The workspace cleared. 100 blocks — gone. Functions, loops, comments, all of it.

I sat there for about three seconds. Then I got mad. Then I got productive.

What I Already Had

CryptoBlocks has a version control system. Checkpoints, history, rollback — the whole thing. I built it months ago. It was sitting right there in the File menu.

I had saved a checkpoint earlier: “Fisher-Yates shuffle done.” I could roll back to that. But everything I built after — the isRoom function, the grid constants, the game engine globals — that was gone.

Auto-save was off. I’d never turned it on because I didn’t think I needed it. I was wrong.

What I Did Next

First, I turned on auto-save. Settings → Auto-save → 1 minute. Never again.

Second, I rebuilt everything I lost. And here’s the thing about rebuilding: it’s faster the second time. Not because the work is easier, but because the decisions are already made. I wasn’t figuring out how to nest AND blocks — I already knew that. I wasn’t debugging the matrix_set input types — I already solved that. I was just executing.

The 100 blocks I lost took 2 hours to build the first time. The rebuild took 30 minutes.

The Lesson

I’m the founder of CryptoBlocks, and I lost work in my own tool. That’s embarrassing. It’s also the most valuable thing that happened this week.

Because now I know — viscerally, not theoretically — what it feels like to lose progress. Every kid who clears their workspace by accident, every student who refreshes the wrong tab, every beginner who doesn’t know what “save” means yet — I felt what they’ll feel.

And that pain made the version control system real to me in a way that building it never did. I didn’t just build the feature. I needed the feature. I used the feature. And I found the gap: auto-save was off by default.

The Fix

Auto-save is still off by default — because new users with a Hello World block don’t need their checkpoint history filled with noise. But the first time you place 20+ blocks without saving, we should probably nudge. That’s on the roadmap now.

The version control system works. The checkpoints work. The rollback works. I just wasn’t using it because I thought I was invincible.

Nobody’s invincible. Save your work.

The Irony

I built the version control system specifically for this moment. I gave talks (to myself, in my apartment) about why checkpoints matter, why auto-save is essential, why “just remember to save” isn’t good enough.

Then I didn’t save. And I lost my work. In my own tool.

The best features are born from pain. This one was born twice.

CryptoBlocks has auto-save, manual checkpoints, and full rollback history. Turn them on. I mean it. Settings → Auto-save → 1 minute. Your future self will thank you.

And if you’re building Pac-Man in blocks — save after every function. Trust me.