itch.io

Alternative contact address:

support
at
cm-works.online

For contact, please use the address provided on my website: https://cm-works.co.za

For examples, please see my published games on this platform. StoneChess for example is a multiplayer game built in a custom engine.

It seems you have no shortage of submissions, but I have added my game StoneChess.

I am a programmer with more than 16 years of programming experience, and my passion has been game development. My core principle is efficiency. I like to write the most efficient code possible, and make no attempts to obfuscate what is happening. There are very few bugs in my work, and fixing bugs and maintaining very large legacy projects are my speciality.

As far as popular game engines go, my experience has mostly been with Godot, but learning other engines is not a challenge. For my own projects I have often opted to write bespoke game engines, just to make sure that nothing is wasted.

As someone living in South Africa, I can offer very competitive rates.

Oh, I get it. I cannot bring myself to add Steam's little headcrab to my game. I do think it will fare a whole lot better there though.

Having it in html5 build also helps a lot as many people ( at least me personally ) would be more comfortable with playing a web game than installing a new game from an unknown publisher on my computer, especially here on itch.

This is of critical importance. I think this is what makes the biggest difference between Itch and Steam. People are absolutely terrified of malware, and I think this goes double for the kind of people that play horror games.

Check this community, every now and then there are Youtubers that are looking for games to play. ASWhaler Gamer for instance has a thread up.

Many people use this platform to dump their trash, and the platform does as little as possible to help the users sort through it.

One trick is to use the amount of work that the game creator put into their page to loosely judge the quality of the game.

There are many good and great games on the platform, and there are many more bad games that make the good games difficult to find. This is a common issue on platforms like this. If you dig hard, you will find some gems, eventually.

The trends are created by the game creators, and by the site's management, who feature the kind of games that they like. Game creators also notice what kind of games get featured, and then make more games like that in an effort to get featured. If you don't like these kind of games, I think that the people that run the site don't care about that. A feature to exclude multiple tags from listings is requested quite frequently, and it gets pretty much ignored every time. The closest to an official response you will likely get, is someone that likes to pop into the conversation and attempt to convince you that you don't really want this feature. Most people who don't share the site's ideology have given up, which is more bad behaviour.

There does not appear to be an easy fix to this problem. There is a hidden feature to exclude single tags, but there is more than one prolific tag filled with garbage. At the moment the solutions are limited to spending time digging through the aforementioned garbage, or to find some third party means to fix it, for example: Write a script to fix it, find another platform, or make your own platform. As you can see, there are no good solutions at the moment. I do suggest to those that disagree with the site's ideology not give in to apathy, and make their own opinions heard, even if it is just for the record. The world is in a bad place, and a lot of work and determination is required to fix it. Be part of the solution.

Thanks, man. It means a lot to me. :)

Thank you for that cool video!

If you're only releasing on itch, then free is the only way you will get any significant traffic in the overwhelming majority of cases. Even so, it will be difficult to rise above the sheer volume of upload traffic, a lot of which is pure nonsense.

There is nothing wrong with ads, but they have been given a bad name by bad actors that have made distracting and obtrusive ads the norm.

I do not understand this.

I get that it is difficult to find good games on many other platforms, but once finding one, why do people not want to buy the game from them? Surely once you have given your details to a platform to buy one game, it becomes very easy to buy another. In my mind it is more convenient to simply download a game and have the installer forever, rather than needing some application always running to do the same thing, and to run the game.

On top of this, there are other games stores more similar to Steam, which don't get any traction.

The devlogs attached to the game make a good way to have a changelog on itch. I think not many people read them.

StoneChess

Wow, this looks incredible.

Are you also South African?

Ah, I assumed you wanted to fix something that needed fixing.

If you are set on implementing a site to post gamedev classifieds, you'll be stuck trying to get users from the sites you mentioned, which already have this feature.

These other platforms you mention don't really want to see self-promotion, often times it is regarded as spam. All of them are also working very hard to make it so that you have to pay them to have any visibility at all.

This platform can be seen more as hosting and selling. It makes available some measures of promotion, like dev logs, but these are not very effective to that end. A lot of good games get lost in the traffic here.

Since I feel like the US is in a bad place economically, and there is a lot of tension in the globe, Id say put Trump back in and let him try to fix it his way.

Leaving the fate of a nation up to such a careless choice (elect him and see what happens) is criminally negligent. You can see how the U.S. got to the state it's in with this attitude. He is not even an unknown quantity, he is a proven liar. His foreign policy is to do whatever Israel wants, and that is the worst thing right now.

I have not seen anyone who was upset about a YouTuber doing that, only thankful.

I suggest adding a checkmark to say that your game is itch.io exclusive, and then give a pre-defined amount of visibility boost to those that are. This will also require a way for users to report games which are not, and a proportional amount of demerit to burden games (or creators) that claimed they were exclusive, but weren't.

I am a skilled programmer, so if you need assistance implementing features, let me know.

Just put them on your CV. If the employer asks for proof, show them the work you did. You don't even have to mention that the programmer took you off the credits, and bringing it up won't get you anything. 

However he gets things done, that I can respect.

The only thing he got done was operation warp speed, and that was a disaster with corporate backing, for corporate benefit. Every one of his other promises got papered over with more promises. Didn't build the wall, didn't lock up the Clintons, he is just another geriatric liar. Harris is bad, but she hasn't lied as much as he has. She hasn't had the opportunity. Neither of them deserve a single vote.

Push my games to your constituents and I'll vote for you.

Thanks for checking it out. I'll have a think about those flags.

The shield blocks a single attack and prevents the attacker from taking the position and the piece. If they are out of AP that leaves the attacker in a dangerous position right adjacent to the piece they tried to take.

Well spotted.

I would appreciate if you put StoneChess on your channel.

You might need a friend for multiplayer if there is no-one else on.

Very thoughtful, TheMetalCarrotDev.

Check out StoneChess. Practically all of it is available in the demo now.

Thank you. :)

Mastodon. I didn't think of that.

I tried Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Twitter I would say is the least effective. It was bad before, but after the corporate version of a "shake-up", it is just downright dysfunctional. I don't know what is holding that site together. At least with Reddit you can say it is fueled by negativity.

Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, all of these seem only useful if you pay for ads, and I don't think I am reaching when I say they work very hard to make it that way.

I don't like to wallow, so this is not my type of game, but I think the GUI is very well done. I do not think it suits the content.

For this type of game I think a punk vibe would be gothic rather than the street art of Dirt. But that wouldn't make me like it any more. It just would be more suited to a kind of game I don't like. ;)

StoneChess has recently been updated with a full demo.

Please tell me what you think, about the game, the page, anything.

Do you know any places on the internet where it might be welcomed?

No one knows anywhere to promote indie games? How can that be?

When there are so many good games just falling through the cracks, daily, how is it that there is nowhere to make people aware of new indie games?

Thank you at least for not saying Reddit.

Sometimes that happens, that they can't walk right after. Might be a feature ;)

I am so jealous of you husband and wife teams.

I'll follow when I can.

Very pretty. Does it scale?

Look around you. Everything is dead because of that attitude.

Don't wallow in filth and then blame others for it if you did nothing, said nothing.

Will that include an .apk? I am too 1337 to use an app store.

Is it coming to desktop?

Search is currently being overhauled, maybe multiple tag exclusion is on the roadmap.

A good example of a really unhelpful comment.

Sharing a suspicion, for example, that all the people that  have asked for multiple tag exclusion only want to exclude horror, and that they can use a bookmark for that, is also not helpful.

It is clear that you do not understand the usefulness of this feature, and if you could be honest, that will not change. You might send hundreds more words to restate your opinion on the matter. Please know that if I don't reply, it's not because I am afraid, or dumbstruck. You and I have made our opinions clear on this matter. Let's hear from someone who has a say in it.