itch.io

Minesweeper explains itself within one or two games, when you hit a bomb all bombs are revealed and it quickly becomes clear that the numbers indicate numbers of bombs. It took me a while to understand the flag thing but the core mechanic is very obvious.

not supposed to recommend your own game...

hmm looks like top-down shooter rather than FPS?

so respectful that you can't repeat the question

ah, well that explains it ^.^

playing other games and sharing feedback it's a good think to help other and show them what they need to do but those are the Developers and my target audience should be the Gamers not developers.

Well, this is primarily a developer's website. To reach a larger gamer audience you'll want to be posting elsewhere too, and having your games available on at least one of the big stores (google play, steam, etc). There is a population of non-developers here, it just isn't that big of a group. And a lot of them are really coming because they are enthusiasts, either of indie games in general, or of a specific niche within the indie sector. (People who come here specifically for visual novels are unlikely to be interested in your WWII shooter)

Already making devlogs and updating my games.

I know, but the one devlog I looked at was really just an advertisement. Normally you would just write about the update, what was added, things that were fixed, and your general thoughts. Some people get really into this and gain followers through writing about the dev process... I don't particularly like doing this but hey, it works for others.

i have no experience in editing itch pages.

There's a very simple built-in editor, just view one of your pages and click on "edit theme". You can change the fonts, backgrounds, add in=line images... a little work here goes a long way toward getting people interested in your work

play other people's games and give constructive feedback

post devlogs

update your pages (your games pages are just using default font and no background or banner images)

get an actual logo for your avatar :P

join game jams

I am hard pressed to find real world examples of pve.

Ninja Warrior :)

Not even 30 yet? You are young, and really it's not too late until you've passed on from this life. Don't compare yourself to people who struck gold when they were younger than you. It is totally pointless, you can't go back to when you were 18 and try again. You can only act TODAY. It doesn't matter if you are 30, 40, or 70... you can still be a game developer.

I saw a great video by the Math Sorcerer on youtube, about this exact topic. He was of course referring to learning math but the concept applies to pretty much anything. He related a story in which he was teaching a night class, so all of the students were a little older and had jobs and families to take care of during the day, but had decided to go back to school and were taking this math class. Anyway he started asking them how long it had been since they took a math class. One guy was over 50 years old and said it had been 30 years since he last took a math class. 30 years!

Another story in that same video involved a fellow professor who was much older, who remarked that when he was in college he could study for 8 hours straight, but now that he was old he could only do about 4 hours of intense math focus. So yeah, you might slow down a bit, but think about that... this guy in his elder years (I think 70s) was able to read advanced math papers for a solid 4 hours.

One thing that "keeps people young" is to continue doing such work, continue learning, continue growing. As you go through life you will realize that the people who can barely get off the couch at 60 years old are usually that way because they have been sitting on the couch for the last few decades. When you resign yourself to a stagnant life, your mind and body follow suit. If you tell yourself "I can't learn anything new" and stop trying, the process of learning becomes more and more difficult. Just like when you stop using a muscle, it weakens over time.

On the other hand there are people out there who are 60, 70, 80 years old and still learning, still doing the things they love, still moving. I play in a band with a drummer who just turned 75. He still carries his drums (we do help him, lol), he still learns new songs, and he's always ready to keep playing. So many times at practice the rest of us have said "ok, it's getting late, we should pack up" and he's like "I could keep going!". 

So anyway that's my rant about age, it isn't nearly as important as people make it out to be. What is important is that you keep using your faculties and pursuing new things. I won't say exactly how old I am (not very) but I can already see some of my peers basically giving up on life, ready to just "stay in their lane." But for me, I've been developing games as a hobby since I was very young, and only now (couple decades later...) am I really starting to put my work out into the world and trying to maybe make a career out of it. Some days it feels exhausting, and I do have a lot more responsibility than I did when I was 16. But it is also exciting to be still learning new things and keeping the dream alive. It makes me feel alive when other people my age seem dead inside, and that's worthwhile on its own regardless of how many sales or how popular any of my projects get. 

discharge from the army

discharge a battery

discharge in bankruptcy

meanwhile I've never really heard someone refer to precum with this word... maybe a doctor would? Anyway I think your interpretation is very far off the mark :P

so... What did you do?

No, I got some points. But I wasn't sure why I got the points, or what the water actually does. 

Making a game self-explanatory is not easy, I aimed for that when making my first game here and realized that you really have to make things obvious the first time around in order for everyone to notice. What is obvious to you is NOT obvious to your players. Some will figure things out you didn't expect them to... others will completely miss something fundamental. 

Ok, played it, yeah I have no idea what is going on other than you lose when the pieces get too high. Also I was able to get some of them stuck at times, like once I lost because a piece didn't fall past the second space and I threw another one :P

Hi, you need to mark the page as public instead of draft, I can't view it

I don't think 90% of games have online multiplayer. Many games are just not designed for that. 

In terms of development, multiplayer is generally much more difficult to deal with, although there are also platforms that do some/all of the dirty work for you so that can help. The scope of the game obviously makes a big difference too. The advantage sometimes is that you have emergent gameplay coming from players actions, meaning you might have less work to do in terms of creating interesting gameplay (you just have to make the mechanics and then let players go to town). Then again, you might end up programming bots anyway to help with empty servers :P

I would like to include a custom font for my page, is it possible to directly use a font other than the available Google fonts?

I also considered using images as a last resort (wouldn't need a ton of text on the page anyway), but I'm concerned about accessibility. I assume I would want to copy the text into the image text field so that anyone who is browsing without images could still read it / TTS it. Anyone have experience with this?

As far as I can tell the only information I can see from purchases are the buyer's email address and IP address, and the transaction handler (i.e. paypal) and transaction ID

It takes a while to be indexed, just be patient. I think my first project took about 2 weeks before it showed in search

if you asked what a small project is I wouldn't be able to give you a confident answer

Anything that can be completed within 1 year :P

I tried to give myself a project that would take 1 month, in reality it took about 4 to 5 months. 

Another thing about length of time working... I have found that sometimes I get more done in 15-30 minutes when I know I have to do something directly after, than in 2 hours. But sometimes I would miss that opportunity because I would think "I can't get anything done in 15 minutes." Not true! You can get 15 minutes of work done... and since it is a small time investment, even if you don't get much done it's not a big loss and you won't be as burnt out.

Of course, if you are really needing rest then that is more important. But if you feel inspired and only have a short time frame, you might be surprised what comes out when you really focus for a short period.

Yeah +1 for divide up your tasks

I don't have ADHD but I can still sit in front of an open project and just stare into the abyss of all the different options and ideas and possibilities.

One thing that really helps me when this is happening, is to just WALK AWAY for a little bit. Going outside and just spending a few minutes enjoying nature, or doing some task that doesn't require a lot of critical thinking like washing the dishes, can be so helpful. Often while I'm doing that I ask myself "OK, what exactly should I be working on?" and try to come up with something concrete. Then I can sit down with already the thought in my head "I'm going to do XYZ", so I can just get right into it instead of spacing out or just endlessly "testing" my game while thinking of ideas.

Sometimes I find it helps to pick something really small and seemingly insignificant. For example, lets say I expect to work on a game for the next 2 hours. That's not a small amount of time and so right at the beginning of that time slot is when I might start wondering, what am I going to accomplish in the next 2 hours? This can become one of those times where I'm just spacing out, with too many options.

Instead, I'll decide to just start with one small task. Like, make a single sprite. It is not something that will take up two hours. But it at least gets the ball rolling, and often by the time I'm finishing that task, I have a better idea of what I want to do next. And if not, then at least I got one sprite done :P

With CFS, it is probably even more important to just work in small amounts and take a lot of breaks. Also, all people benefit from sunshine, fresh air, exercise, and good food, so get as much of that stuff as you can!

Itch is cool because it doesn't have ads, also you can put ads in your game in GDevelop but since you just uploaded two of their game examples without even bothering to change the titles, I'm guessing that is too much work for you

The corpos are already doing the job for you by firing their workers.

I can't imagine any ground troops getting even a shred of ownership over the games they were working on, so there is nothing to fund.

Consumers can crush these corporations overnight by simply not buying their trash

Yeah be careful not to scam people into downloading your game for free :P

As a robot I depreciate this

You'd have to ask the developers of the game, this is for help with the itch.io site itself :)

As soon as the invisibility thing was introduced I found it frustratingly difficult to play single-player. Even for two players, I could see this being a frustrating level, and since there are no other puzzle elements introduced before this it just doesn't set a good trajectory for the game. I would have expected to at least do the "player presses button, other player walks through door" thing once or twice before being chased down by a bot. 

Hazy Road:

  Link color is hard to see. After reading the page and looking at the screenshots, I feel like I don't know what the game is really about. Maybe some more specific description of what you do in the game, or screenshot/video that makes it more obvious, would be helpful.

Ghost-Snap:

 I like this page, very short and sweet, I would change the first sentence to say something other than "snapping" because some people might not understand that slang term especially if English isn't their first language. I would just put "game about photographing ghosts", or at least "snapping pictures". 

Marble:

 This one also looks pretty good and has the most information. But I would be less likely to download this because it seems to be just a toy rather than a game? If you could build your own course that would change everything :P

It definitely looks appealing, but you might want to scale up some of the examples. Especially the animated characters, they could be twice as big honestly. I think part of the issue is the actual image size being too big, so itch.io is squishing them? Those animated characters are 192x192, and the screenshots are 1260x1000. It looks fine when you click on the screenshot for a bigger view but just on the page, you can't see the detail very well.

There is no reason to disclose your age online. And several reasons not to...

The more damage a shield takes, the harder it becomes to block with it.

I think I see where you are going with this part but it sounds counter-intuitive for a game. I mean, keeping track of equipment is already a task, but having an equipment that constantly drains away its usefulness could be tedious. And may lead to a meta where players always ditch them for one with less damage, or even stop using them altogether.

Then again I'm imagining the shield going from 100% to 0% effectiveness in line with how damaged it is, which may not be what you intend. You did say player skill would make it easier to block with a very damaged shield. However this is the one piece that is supposed to be different and not "boring" 

I don't know why you'd think that can work in the first place. If you delete the entire project, it is gone. There's no feasible way to then resurrect it later just because the name or URL is the same. And even if there was, there would be no way to know if the new project was even intended to be retroactively updated to appear in the same places as before. What if someone else creates a different project down the road that just happens to have the same name, should it get added to people's library who downloaded your old thing?

Took me about 45 minutes to figure out what Down Arrow does
Also you can fly off the screen if you jump off the cat I think? But not otherwise?

I see... I had considered that possibility but it really didn't look that way from here because of the difference in style (I did realize that Prose-Duuri was the one connection, I guess the other things listed under your name threw me off). 

Sweet! If you would prefer to discuss via email or discord here's my addys:

magicsofastudios@gmail.com

Discord: magic.sofa

Hey there... I was wondering if you need a soundtrack??

Yes, but it is up to the uploader to write the license terms, usually included with the download in license.txt or similar

Another option is to look for assets from people here on itch or other places where you can download stuff directly from creators. It only involves a little extra work (i.e. importing the assets into your project manually instead of letting the store do it for you) and you will be able to find more unique works. You'll also be supporting indie artists by hopefully crediting them and/or paying. 

I think they look quite nice! It is definitely not "the usual style" which is a good thing in my opinion, but does affect what projects they could be used in.

What I mean is, the overall look is slightly messy and I mean that in the best way possible ^.^ Compare to something like this which has softer color transitions and more distinct boundaries. I do like your work though, it has a grainy naturalness to it which is cool. I point this difference out because I think the rest of the game would have to have a similar vibe in order for these sprites to fit in properly. I guess that's a consideration for all artwork and sounds kinda obvious, and really someone might come along and say "this is exactly what I'm looking for." I would consider adding some tags that might help connect to that person... words that they might search for such as "natural" or "grainy"

I do see some things that I think could be improved, mainly with the outlines and shading. For example some of the bars are not looking too hot... the red and olive green ones near the top look the best to me, while the magenta one looks the worst. Some of the pieces of wood look flat rather than round. A few of the outlines are interesting colors that I'm not sure about... I guess some of them are supposed to be glowing? I'm mainly talking about the purple rough ore that has a red outline, and some of the cubes. I would think these outlines should be darker.

Using assets that you are allowed to use, or that you paid for, is certainly OK.

Basically this person is accusing you of making a generic game just to make money. An asset flip isn't just any game that doesn't produce everything in-house. That would be insane... tons of developers use free and paid assets from other people. The term is really supposed to refer to games that are slapped together as quickly as possible for the sole purpose of making a few bucks.

It sounds like they are just being a harsh critic, I mean if it is your second game (congrats!) then nobody should expect it to be some sort of masterpiece. But people don't always look into your history or even come up with a legitimate criticism. Like maybe if you had a history of reusing the same assets in similar games over and over, and you were actually making a lot of sales from it, it would be fair to say you're a "flipper." But to say this to someone who is just starting out is pretty much ridiculous.