Four possible reasons:
You have a typo.
The game is not publicly indexed for searching.
It is an adult game and from where you search you are not configured to see adult content. Like in a private window without being logged into your Itch acocunt.
And for some games: the game title was not relevant enough for your search term. There are only like 60 results or so. If there are 120 games relevant to the search term, the results will be cut in half.
i will like to heard the community experience with this issue.
I once got a reply after reporting a bug. For other things, there were no responses.
Most of the time there is no need for a response. Especially for the things you see in community threads. People do not want answers, they want their case to be worked on.
And there might be something fundamentally wrong in how tickets/support requests are queued. It seems as if requests can get lost. Ignored. Misunderstood. There was a virus I told them about. They did absolutely nothing for several months. And I believe to remove an indexed malware to be more important than all those threads about people wanting their game to get indexed faster. The virus was since removed, but probably because I wrote them again, and not because of my initial ticket. This is very worrying. With over a million projects, such requests should not get lost. Because then you get things like I already encountered: malware with an age of up to two years. Out in the open. Uncontested. If I remember correctly, there were even comments on the page about it being a virus.
I fear that people are not motivated to report malware, because they do not see results. Not even after waiting several weeks. I certainly lose motivation over that. Why bother reporting viruses, if Itch does absolutly nothing from my perspective.
The tagline is expanded as a tooltip by hovering over it. But I guess one would not do that, if the first half is not peaking interest. Also, if someone hovers over the game, then probably over the cover and not over the tagline. So there will be a bigger thing. The popup with the screenshots and the cutted off first paragraph of the game description.
Steam uses an actual blurb. That's not a tagline on Steam descriptions. It is always displayed in full. Also, you see them only if you are already on the complete game description page. You do not see the taglines/blurbs while browsing for games on Steam. Not even in a popup. There are popups, but they show screenshots. (At least I did not find a place where they show the tagline.)
Interestingly enough, the tagline is not shown on the project page. Which is kinda lame.
You cannot influence where the tagline is cut off. That is dependant on the user's interface. It has about as much width as the image over it. And that changes, if you change zoom on the browser. The 36 item grid also changes, so you can have 3x12 or 4x9 or 6x6. And with changes in size the browser might chose a different rendering of the letters. And I did not even look how this is shown on mobile or in the Itch app.
So what to use the "tagline" for? Anything that fits. Literally and figuratively. You have little space, but you can enter information there that complements the picture or title. I see many projects that give information in the title. That's bad for searches. They could shift that information in the tagline. Or if you have a generic cover and title, you can add interesting bits to make it more appealing.
From a platform design point of view, I would have assumed that the tagline/short descripion/blurb would show up in the popup along with the screenshots. Since it is not shown in the game description, that feels like a wasted opportunity. And the first paragraph of game descriptions often contains not really helpful things to make the game appealing.
I assume this is about the tagging or lack of tagging and the project still showing up under the tag regardless.
The announcement of the feature:
https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging
If you select “yes,” then your page will automatically receive the AI Generated tag.
For projects that select “no,” they will receive the tag No AI.
Note: It’s not necessary to use these “automatic” tags manually when classifying your page. We may rename or modify them to fit future classification needs, so please correctly fill out the disclosure form instead of manually tagging.
"Receiving" the tags is not exactly correct. The projects will decidedly not get a tag. But they will be searchable via the tag search. This results in what you see: your project appears in tag-no-ai, but it will not have no-ai in the info box under tags. Same for the 5 AI tags. Any AI tags you do see, where chosen manually as regular tags.
As leafo said, they might change the feature in the future. Maybe there will be a different button for filtering. Maybe they will display a meta information section with more detailed information in case a project is disclosed as having AI. Just like the info box currently expands on different kinds of existing meta information. The secion about "made with" and "average session" and others will also only display, if there is any information. Just like I elaborated in my wish below, how it should look. Non information should not be displayed, but information should. Not having AI is not information to me.
But unfortunately, they currently do not display the information of a game using AI. But to my reading of the quality guidelines, games should have had disclosure even before that disclosure feature. In the description. Maybe my reading is not correct and the context is different. But it still says this in the quality guidelines (in an easy to miss sentence, so maybe there is a context issue in my understanding.)
This whole implementation feels like a quick hack to make it work. A makeshift solution for that grace period with the assets that is mentioned in the announcement. So that users can already use some of that functionality.
Uhm?
To my knowledge all the no-ai tags and the ai-generated tags that you can see in the info boxes were selected by the devloper in the 10 tags to select or write in. Both those tags were in use before the AI disclosure changes. And they can still be selected.
Just like you are considering to manually use one of your 10 tags to say "no-ai".
Sorry for distressing you. But I am afraid you will get only opinions and guesses here. The real scrapers are unlikely to show up here and talk business.
On that other sites the situation might be vastly different due to how they handle tags and how accurate those tags are. Filtering for the #noai might be their most reliable option.
On Itch the manually added tags would not change filtering in the case that someone were to filter for no-ai. Things will appear in the tag no-ai either by manually selecting no-ai or by filling out the ai disclosure with "no".
If a scraper bot looks for tags onpage on Itch, that means the bot creator knows about Itch tags and can just as well use inbuilt tag filter system to prefilter the input for the scraper. Would be a lot more accurate too, since the 11 tags are not really meant for meta information.
And from a player's perspective (mine), seeing no-ai (as a tag) is not informative. That's the default. It is not information. If any, I want to see detailed info about ai-usage and not about non-ai-usage. I do also not see that a renpy game was not made with unity and not made with rpg maker and that no puppies were hurt in the making of it. I like the ai disclosure information on Steam with the detailed info, and that is only shown, if there is ai things going on.
If a dev cares for these things and want's to make a statement about how no ai was used, I would prefer this to be positivly worded. Saying that it was hand crafted by the developer. Or commissioned with links to the artist, or whatever. no-ai can also mean pictures drawn in sweat shop by child labor, to exaggerate. A lot of people that want to avoid ai, do so for ethical reasons. Not having used ai does not equate that the things done there were created ethically. And I know a professional studio that was very unethical like not paying artists and such. At least that's what I heard about that studio.
Hmm. Might be a case of correlation and causation not being equal.
New & popular games will of course have been seen on recent. But was that the cause of their popularity. Would the have gotten popular regardless because of their promotion?
If doing zero promotion, being seen at some places where people look is of course of benefit, I guess. But this is horror genere and there are like 1500 new horror games each month. Even with promotion, chances are low to get popular, just because people try the game. Using a major update bump for that with a 22 days old game is futile imho. You are still on top of recent for your tags.
After a fleeting glance at your game, my impression is, that your game is doing well. And this is backed up at your ranking in this here.
https://itch.io/games/last-30-days/tag-psx
That's roughly place 30 of 130.
https://itch.io/games/new-and-popular/tag-psx
It is on page 3 of 108, so maybe people should ask you for advice ;-)
I doubt Germans or Danes would get the hint that "midnight" is a stand in for adults only content. Mitternacht is more for ghost stories.
For English speakers and mostly in the UK, you might have used blue as a code word. Such as in Blue Movies.
For the germanic languages you might use a direct approach, if you want to spell out in your account name, what you sell. But I guess that this will have zero influence either way. People will not search your content by your user name. If they specifically search for it, they might use
https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-adult/tag-ai-generated
Ther are only 100, and 5 of them are yours.
But look at your anayltics, maybe you find inspiration there, how you can get found more easily by people looking for your content.
You seem to have misread the question.
no-ai means that no ai was used. It is not a warding sign against ai scrapers to not visit.
So many misunderstandings here. I deleted my post above, it had an explanation too, but OP was offended because I asked an AI how AI are trained.
It kinda is explained here https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging , but people tagging their projects or browsing for things might not have read that. Even after reading, it is not that intiuitve.
The AI disclosure creates virtual tags that are not visible on a page, but can be filtered with the tag system regardles. And because Itch has freestyle tagging, those virtual tags also exist as regular tags. I suspect that the OP stems from that quirk. The projects of OP are already tagged no-ai because of the ai disclosure, so musing over tagging them no-ai will lead to nowhere. Unless OP want's a discussion if one should also tag it manually.
It does not matter if you tag it or not.
See here
https://itch.io/games/tag-cats/tag-cooking/tag-no-ai
You need to enter gay in the box.
To use the exclude feature, you transform a tagname into the url modifier as shown here
https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel
https://itch.io/games?exclude=tg.visual-novel
What the tool does is, to give you a box to write in "visual-novel", so you do not need to manually add "?exclude=tg.visual-novel".
And it also makes this url change persist. For a recurring search, you can also just simply use a bookmark, no need for a tool.
That's strange.
If this is the genrefilter, the games must have the genre set as their main genre. It will not block games that have that genre set as a regular tag.
If this is the button for the single tag exclusion, you need to be logged into your Itch account while browsing for the feature to work (has nothing to do with my script). And you need to enter the tag as seen in the url without the prefix. So if the tag is shown as genre-visual-novel in the url, you enter visual-novel. If it is tag-3d-platformer, you enter 3d-platformer.
Both those tag blocking options work on my system, as I just tested. I am on Chrome.
Just a reminder. The criminals will change their methods regularly. You cannot take anything as a green flag. Not even follower count. If the the scam is good and the fake game appealing, there might be a lot of followers that did not notice that it is a scam. I saw scams with over 50 followers and genuine comments.
And the scammers will fake everything, if they think it will help disguise the scam. Including linking to the original developer's socials, if they impersonate a developer.
I was gonna bring the smartphone analogy. Beat me to it.
AI is not the first tech that comes along and suddenly is everywhere. The internet itself counts too.
There will be two aspects of AI. How ordinary people use it in their everyday life. And how professionals (and some hobbiests) will use it to do things.
But no matter how it will turn out to be used, we need some type of consensus how to treat AI things. Things like games are one thing. But AI is used to fake politicalized pictures and lie to people. Evil governments can do very nasty things in terms of propaganda. Trust in governments and media is eroding for quite a while now and AI is not helping there. Hmm. Maybe it could, actually. Teach an AI to verify, if something is AI made or something like that.
But yeah, the tech is gonna stay. The question is, how and who will use it for what purpose and in what extent. There was this famous quote about how much memory a computer would need, that did not turn out so well...
I am also not for or against it, in general. But I am very concerned. And I think any shortsighted solution will not do. Like trying to ban AI that was trained with non consented materials.
You tried to open a Javascript-File from my project and got an error message. Did I understand that correctly?
If so, it might be better if you reply/comment on the project page, as troubleshooting will go offtopic here.
I have several files on that project that are Javascript. And none of them is supposed to be opened. The zips are to be installed. And the two .js files are supposed to be imported into a browser extension called Tampermonkey.
Open it how? Which file?
The tm scripts you would import in the utility section of tampermonkey. The button for that might be hidden. It is not in the utility section of the context menu of tm, but in the utilty section that appears when opening the dashboard of tm by clicking the cog wheel.
The other thing is a chrome extension. You do not open it, but "install" it with developer mode functionality.
I feel that there might be an announcement due, when the grace period is over and any asset not filling out the disclosure is automatically unindexed. About 20k are not disclosed about their ai status.
But the assets on sale are pretty much all disclosed. 5255 total, 4614 no-ai and 624 ai-gen. Makes like 20 without disclosure.
As a reminder, the ai and noai tags are invisible. The ones you see, are not done so by disclosure, but by manually chosing them as a regular tag.
Funny that you tackled the issue from that angle.
I think there are three aspects to consider. Copyright. Trademarks. Patents.
After glancing over the topic, I suspect the major problem might be patents. You can apparantly patent the rules of a board game, if they have something unique. I assume that would extend to adaption to those rules into a video game. And I assume a successful game like that did file patents.
That is a charity bundle. Not a regular bundle.
From the bundle page: 100 % of proceeds are transferred automatically...
That means it is configured as direct to you payout directly to that charity. I assume that this was only possible with paypal, since that charity does not seem to have a credit card donation option. They do accept bank transfer and paypal can pay out to bank accounts.
For anyone wondering what happened here:
Someone, E, made a reply and got blocked for that reply. E was told by the blocker, it was due to trolling.
E could not accept that and went on to insult the blocker and spin theories that the block was not due to trolling, but for other, personal, reasons.
I foolishly tried to point out, that E was literally told the reason and that E's posting indeed can be seen as trolling.
Then E went on to start insulting me and twisted my words several times and tried to shift the discussion about how I am a bad person. It got confusing a bit, with E even literally claiming to have trolled me. I kid you not. At last I was accused of accusing E of trolling and E finally blocked me and later removed comments. The part where E claimed to have trolled me was very disturbing, hence the longishly escalation.
Please, do not go against the persons in a discussion. Go against their points, if you disagree with those. And what irks me, how hard it is to understand nuances for people. Some in this thread got the impression I do not like lgbt games. The irony is, I do. But I want to see them done in a satisfacatorial manner. And not as a checklist excercise.
Grats on finding it.
There might be several stages of removal, when Itch does it, so they can rollback or whatever. But if it is fully removed (or made unavailable), that looks the same. Hole in collection.
My best guess is, that in this case the dev made the game un-public, since the account seems to be still there.
This is a scam
The project has isometric right in the title. And you complain that it is not a 3d asset?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_projection#Usage_in_video_games_and_pixe...
Regardless, you need to contact support for a refund. But your scam allegations are unfounded.
That looks the same. You can't tell who removed it. Only that there is a hole in your collection. Took me a while to figure out that most of those are developers that delete their game and make a new page with the same game. But if it was not updated for long, that sounds like some other reason for removal. Though I also saw devs that would remove a prototype and upload a new project with the finished game.
Oh and yeah, I saw malware on Itch that lived for two years. And stolen games for over half a year. https://itch.io/t/3512426/itch-is-not-a-safe-place-do-not-download-things
If you remember last time you visited the page and your browser's history from that time still exists, maybe you can look there for clues.
https://itch.io/t/3693485/do-not-update-your-games-by-deleting-them-and-uploadin...
That might have happened. It is an annoying feature of Itch.
The dev also might have deleted the game or made it unavailable. Or the game was removed by Itch.
(If it is still here, and the dev tagged it appropriately, maybe you will find it in here https://itch.io/games/tag-giantess)
The quarantine system is meant to quarantine potential harmful projects. If you knew an actual way of avoiding that, any bad actor will do the same and nullify the intended effect of quarantine.
Please read the quarantine message again. All of it. Like "until our team has reviewed the page". And the link that explains how Itch is used for scams.
Waiting times for staff to do things unfortunately are weeks, and not days, as the faq says. I hope they optimise their system to bring that down to days again.
Would you approve a refreshment of "recent" for a game that has been launched a week ago?
Your game is still is on recent on page 9 for adult games. And on page 2 for furry games. Page 2! For all intents and purposes in regard to your target audience you are on top of recent. All the people that regularly browse recent for such games will see your game cover.
My impression is, that a realistic expectancy is 2-4 months. You also have this to consider: there are a lot of games and a lot of devs releasing "major" updates. So it stands to reason that there are more major updates than there are new games. Would you, as a user, expect the sorting of the platform that shows you the most recent games to display mostly old games or mostly new games on top?
They should really add a sorting with recently updated or whatever. It is ambigous what recent means. The url calls it newest and not recently updated. So I guess the intention once was to have a sorting by publishing date. But that was watered down with the inclusion of a bump due to a major update.
They are better, imho.
Now, if there were just not so many other game developers to compete with.
Apart from luck and active advertisements, I think there are only a few things to improve for cheap, and they might not even have that much of an impact. Probably. One would be to not have a cover image. Not having screenshots would be a big one for me. Having no comment section. Disabled ratings. A bland tagline. Inaccurate tags. An overly marketing speech as a description with empty promises and no information. AI generated texts on profile page or game description. That kind of things. Having no demo version for a paid game. They are zero cost to improve, but might deter some potential players, if they should stumble upon a game.
That list is subjective, but I just can't imagine a good reason to prefer the game that does it "wrong" over a game that does it "right", all other things being equal. But the effect can be negligible. Just look at the success of game like Baldi's Basic. Once a thing is famous enough, quirks might actually improve reception, if they are in line with the style.
Oh, and now I know, why I did not read those one liners at first. I looked at your games on your profile and a profile page does not display those. The account page does.
The mobile market is saturated with big players and attention seeker games. If you do not walk that path, you will have a hard time to get attention to your game.
Maybe it can help if you concentrate on making a game first and a mobile game later. What is it about your game, that makes it a "mobile" game? Does it need the gyro sensor in a phone to work or what? Is it about attention span and casualness? People play silly games on desktop too.
While Itch has capabilites to upload some mobile games, it is specialized for desktop. Oh, people do ask for mobile versions of games all the time. But they searched out the game for the game's sake and not because it has a mobile version. So you might find a certain bias for non mobile games here.
a simple way to do that without coding
If you want branching, reacting to previous decisions and such, that is coding. Wether you do it with actual code or some visual buttons and diagrams or whatever.
So what you might actually seek is no code tools. For games. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=no+code+tools+for+games&ia=web
Would be interesting if someone can recommend some of those specifically for making story games. Which proably means visual novels.
Games are not playing themselves. There is always someone doing the playing. Even if the game itself has no possibility of interaction with other players.
Look at another activity. Reading books. Even there you will have people gathering in book clubs or other activities sharing the single person activity of reading a book.
And for a digital activity that is even more easy. Like playing the game on a platform with achievements and bragging with your achievements to your online friends. Or, to yourself. Like a highscore.
So, no, of course not. Games do not have to be social. But some people will use it for social interaction anyway and will be glad for any support to do so. Even something as simple as easy screenshots, that can be shared on social media. Though on most games there do not need to be support for that, but the technical capabilites of users on average are not really good, so some would not know how to do that on their own.
There is also another group of people, that will loathe any forced social interaction. There are games that shove the "share your activity" and other meta things in your face. Among the worst are forced launchers. Account requirements for a single player game. And so on.
Your game is not yet in the search catalogue of Itch.
You can promote it anyway, as direct access to the game link is not hindered by this. Also, search engines do not really care much about this anyway. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SpaceSouls-AQuickEnemytest&ia=web has your game on #1.
Waiting time for getting "indexed" is either a minute or a variable time between a few days and a few months. Waiting times longer than 30 days are rare, but it happens.
To check if your game is indexed, search your username. https://itch.io/search?q=gnsolo
Well, there are tools for which their existence is already unethical because of how they were made. There is debate about that. While an exagarration, you can see a similar thing going on with veganism. The tools being food and things like leather. Vegans do not care how you use that leather glove.
And whatever someone wants to express through their AI made game, some will consider it cheaply made. Games are part of the art spectrum of crafts. They are not a necessity. So which artists to support is a complex question. And I think if you support an artist who uses AI, you do it despite the AI usage, and not because of it. While you might support the artisanship of a hand drawn game because it is hand made.
I can tolerate AI out of need for resources and lack of skills in the visual arts. But there are some that let even the plot be written by AI. That can be funny once as an experimental game. But it would be the core of what you call expression. With AI, that's not expression, that's a cheap cash grab. You do not even need AI for that kind of shovelware.
It will be a while till AI operating and prompting skills are recognised as their own skillset. Unfortunately, there is no grace period where only professionals can use the tech, like there was for photography. Anyone can type something in a prompt. I wonder how photography would be seen, if it had started with a device like a smartphone.
The reason is simple: AI cannot have passion.
That's not a good reason to be indifferent. A lot of things have no passion. In fact, all things have no passion. It goes with the attribute of being a thing.
You can ask if we should use a certain thing for a certain task. And why, or why not. Should we use guns to feel secure? Should we use cars that burn fossil fuels to commute? Should you use a spoon to open a can? Should we use tools to do work? What about if those tools are unethical? What if those tools make human work obsolete? What if that work was art, a thing that makes humans human?
There are valid concerns about AI and they should be discussed.
The pragmatic view on games is, that games with AI art usually look boring and all alike. Same with texts generated by AI. You can tell a lot of profile and even game descriptions were not written by an amateur developer, but most likely the result of a prompt. It is low effort and cheap.
On the other hand, with AI you can overcome a barrier. Can't draw, have no money, wanna make a game with images that still had your influence? AI can help there.
"AI"'s thoughs on this are this, btw:
AI should not be used in the creation of video games because it can undermine human creativity, reduce job opportunities for artists and developers, and lead to generic, less emotionally resonant content. Relying on AI may also result in ethical concerns around originality and intellectual property.
AI should be used in the creation of video games because it can speed up development, reduce costs, and assist with complex tasks like procedural content generation, adaptive gameplay, and realistic NPC behavior. It enhances creativity by handling repetitive work, allowing developers to focus on storytelling and innovation.
Sounds like a scam. Especially if they lure you with their own connections.
Or is this an actual reputeable university and the enroll price of one of those countries where education costs a fortune?
Maybe start with remote courses that are meant for people that have a job. Or better, do some jam games for free and fun. You can code. You will quickly learn, if game making is even something you wanna do. Apart from story, a game is nothing more than a complex algorithm. Making this fun and rewarding is game design. But coding it in the first place, would be a skill you should already have.
I think there is a big difference between a specialist coder working for a game studio and a solo developer or tiny studio. Solo developers very often do their own art and basically everything. Creating a game is such a big field of individual skills you can apply. Writing. Game design. Graphics. Classic AI. Level design. And so on. Including marketing.
