I will share more about marketing since I have been learning it for a while: - you definitely need a trailer - which needs to be majority just gameplay, gameplay should start ideally immediately or otherwise within first 5 sec of trailer - you also need GIFs - on itch anywhere you can put an image, you can put a gif
even your profile picture can actually be a gif (mine is lol)
- you can also work on making your itch page look better - but i'm not sure how much effect this has, you should probably focus on bringing people to your page first
- find different communities to post in - not just indie or gamers communities - but also communities specific for your game's niche. like top down shooter, neon games, etc - I recommend doing this search for individual games rather than just once and assuming all your projects will fit in it
- you can also post in communities of fellow developers - for example if you used unity to make this game, you can post it in unity server
- for communities I prefer looking through reddit and discord - I find a lot of subreddits and discord servers when I start looking - facebook groups is also an option but there may be more posters than post viewers there
- if you want to improve your itch page - Good work on it btw, it looks great!:
- you can get creative with the banner placement - you can use transparency to make the banner look like part of the page
- you can use GIF as your banner but you will need to check how high quality it could be - using screenshots section for GIFs is better
- speaking of that, definitely make little snippets of your game as GIFs and post them in screenshots - at least as a viewer, this makes world of difference
- you can also make use of background, this one page I saw added a glitch effect GIF as background to make it look like the page has a glitch effect, pretty cool!
- a browser embed game is a lot more accessible, even if not full game, adding even a demo as browser embed can help