How do you have 300 followers after 3 days without being indexed for 2 of those days? Itch temporarily delists for a lot of reasons to have a human check things. The fight against malware and scanner triggers are only one of the reasons. Suspicous traffic could be another.
Waiting time for indexing of over 30 days is not unusual. That was not a typo. I meant thirty days. Also, you have payment active. First time paid indexings are supposed to take longer.
I have seen literally hundreds of malware projects and I can tell that your project has some red flags and some green flags (more green than red). In combination with your project age and payment active it is a small wonder your game was indexed at all on the first day.
I guess some of the red flags or Itch's scanner triggered a warning. If it were a serious warning, your game would be quarantined and not delisted. Or it is as simple as you activating payment with the update.
Anyway, your external traffic might speed up the waiting time. Your marketing obviously is effective. And following a direct link is not dependend on being indexed.