Second, please have a web version
I agree to this so much, and I am surprised again: only 7 can be played in the browser on 25 entries. I don't understand.
I always believed it was safer not to download and run executable from the internet without knowing the source enough. Am I too cautious or are people rather trusting? I know the risk is not big, even less on itch.io, but it can mess up things when it happens...
Even still, it helps a lot with allowing people to play it on a variety of setups/OSes.
Speaking personally, I tried building my game for HTML and Linux and neither worked. Former I think because of certain programming decisions we made, latter because... I guess something's weird about my distro, I have no idea. I think this is a bit of a GameMaker issue and other engines have better build options & compatibility? But yeah that's why Snack Wanderer is windows download only.
If any of the games were real viruses we might not know until well after the jam was over and someone had a malware attack on their machine. Viruses are more sneaky than flashy these days. I think it’s more likely that someone’s antiviral software will signal a false-positive and everyone will dogpile on it because Lycos went bonkers over a PDB file in it. It happened twice already. Two games got flagged as viruses by people’s malware only to be cleared by virustotal.
I’m not sure if I’m coherent, but the point I’m trying to make is web builds avoid these problems entirely because the browser is sandboxed and you don’t have to download anything to try it. I like having both because I can play the game to see if I like it and then download it to keep it if I do.
Part of the issue with web versions boils down to itch’s limitations, especially for RPG Maker titles. The version of Fatch Quest I uploaded for the jam wasn’t under 500MB unzipped (though a proper web export probably would’ve been), nor was it less than 1000 total files, making it ineligible for a web release - not that I had the spare time to figure out how to set one up anyways. The patched versions have trimmed out unused default RPG Maker resources enough to put them within the limit, but now that the jam’s entered its judging phase I can’t upload to the game page for another 12 days.
For most small or medium-sized RPG Maker games, checking the ‘Exclude unused files’ box is enough to get you within the limits (especially if you trim all the unused enemies, actors, tilesets, etc. out of your database), but there are other concerns you have to worry about. Particularly, the way the exclusion function works is that the editor just scans your maps and database for references to file names for images, tilesets, music, SE, etc. If you’re using a plugin involving any sort of image handling or custom audio - even stuff like custom interface buttons or GUI enhancements - the exclusion search will probably miss them, leading the exported game to have missing images or audio if you don’t manually copy them to the export folder before uploading. The workaround is to create an event somewhere (even if it’s never used) that references each object - a Show Picture command for each image, etc. For Fatch Quest, there’s less than 20 images I needed to do this for, and so it only took a minute or two to set up. For Magical Viking Erika, that’d require references to nearly 300 images across three dozen subfolders, with the next update increasing that total substantially - I’ve had to write a custom build script to handle what gets included and what gets excluded.
