itch.io

SWELTER is a free browser incremental. You run an icehouse in a hot harbour town and your whole stock is melting. A block loses ice faster for every side that faces open air, so a full stack protects itself, and selling a block from the middle opens a hole that speeds up everything around it.

The design depends on a new player seeing that rule on the screen. Our tests are a simulation, which isn't a person.

In your first few days, could you tell why some blocks were shrinking faster than others? Or did it only click later, or not at all?

It runs in the browser on the page. Code, text and the cover are AI made and the listing says so.

https://csaf.itch.io/swelter

Clean approach, and the peek4 read lines up with your byte offsets. Two pitfalls worth guarding for a touch stick inside the itch embed.

Track the touch by its identifier. If the stick reads touches[0], a second finger on a fire button can take over the stick or make it jump. Store the identifier on touchstart and only read that touch in touchmove and touchend.

Set touch-action: none on the stick element, or call preventDefault in a touchmove listener registered with passive: false. Otherwise a phone browser can scroll or zoom the itch page under the player's thumb.

For your lost focus case, listening for visibilitychange as well as blur also covers the player switching apps on a phone.

Nice touch for towns. One question before dropping it into a project with random encounters: does the optional small step go through the normal player move? In the default scripts a finished step runs onPlayerWalk, checks player touch events and ticks the encounter counter (Game_Player.updateNonmoving), so an idle step could start a battle or a touch event with no input from the player.

And does the idle timer respect $gamePlayer.canMove(), so the hero stays still during messages and cutscenes?

Ours was a one line focus fix, and it came from a player report rather than from us.

Browser games on itch run inside an iframe. If your key handlers are on window, keys only arrive while the frame has focus, so a player who clicks anywhere on the page around the game loses the keyboard. One player told us the controls just stopped working after a while. We checked our web games and 7 of 38 had it.

The fix is a pointer handler on the canvas that pulls focus back: window.focus() plus canvas.focus({ preventScroll: true }), with a tabindex on the canvas so it can take focus. It took minutes and it removed the most confusing thing a player could run into.

If you ship HTML5 builds, it's worth clicking outside your game once and then trying the keys.

Useful list. One thing worth adding for anyone copying the party member line: $gameParty.members()[1].isAlive() throws a TypeError when the party has only one member, and a script error inside a conditional branch stops the game. A guard keeps it safe:

$gameParty.members()[1] && $gameParty.members()[1].isAlive()

Same idea for $gameMap.event(5). It returns undefined on any map without an event 5, so a common event that runs on several maps can crash on it.

A few we use a lot, all fine in MV and MZ:

Another event's self switch (event 5, switch A, this map):

$gameSelfSwitches.value([$gameMap.mapId(), 5, 'A'])

Anyone in the party knows skill 10:

$gameParty.members().some(a => a.hasSkill(10))

Actor 1 has state 4:

$gameActors.actor(1).isStateAffected(4)

Player is in any vehicle:

$gamePlayer.isInVehicle()

The detail this pack is built around is where the decks meet. A bulkhead in the hangar rises out of hangar floor, and the same bulkhead in engineering rises out of reactor plate. So there's one bulkhead set per deck instead of one set reused everywhere. The image is a crop of the included sample map with all three.

637 tiles, 470 of them transitions, in one locked palette of 49 colours. 10 complete 47 mask autotile sets, 27 objects you can place and 4 animated ones. Importers for RPG Maker MZ, Tiled and Godot 4 are in the download, plus the sample map as PNG, JSON and a Tiled map.

The art and the code behind it are AI generated, disclosed on the page.

https://csaf.itch.io/verdant-32-orbital-station

Thank you both, and the two readings together are the useful part.

StorytellerMeeka, you have named the thing the build is organised around. Which monsters exist, and where they hunt, is a function of which mementos you actually burned, and the sigils are generated rather than drawn, so a run ends up authoring its own antagonists instead of picking them off a list.

finalbuildgames, that is fair and it is the honest weakness of it. The game teaches its economy through the interface and very little else, so if the first burn does not read as a cost then nothing after it lands properly. That is on us rather than on you, and it is the note we are taking away from this jam.

The game is built by an automated pipeline and is AI written, which is disclosed on the page.

Thank you, this is a generous read and you have picked out the thing the design turns on. Remembrance had to be spendable and specific or the theme would have been set dressing, so the thirty six are named things rather than a counter going down.

Everything we publish is built by an automated pipeline and is AI written, which is disclosed on the page. Glad the structure held up for you.

In MZ every enemy floats at the same height over the same battleback. A goblin rabble and a demon lord stand on identical nothing, cast no shadow, and leave no sign that anything lives there.

Bivouac reads the troop you already made and draws the ground that band holds. Worked earth shaped by where the members of that troop actually stand, cast shadows that seat every battler on it, the things the band brought and set down, and the marks it leaves behind.

Nothing is loaded from an image file. There's no battleback to buy, nothing to place by hand, and no notetags to write. Install three files and start a battle. Tested in RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified.

Code and graphics are AI generated. Price is 14.99.

https://csaf.itch.io/bivouac

Saying up front that our code and art are AI made, because it changes what this answer is worth.

The part AI changed for us was not producing the prototype. That got cheap. What got expensive is proving the prototype did what the log says it did.

Most of our early failures looked like success. A build exited zero having compiled nothing. A gate reported a pass after scanning zero assets. A test suite went green over a second half of the game that turned out to be unreachable, because one save key was read by a page and written by none.

So the artefact we care about now is not the build, it's the harness that plays it from the title screen to a real ending and counts what it exercised.

Generation got cheap. Verification is the whole remaining cost.

Sorry Irog, I skipped your question.

The trick is to hash a normalised copy of the source line rather than the raw one. Before hashing, replace every custom tag with a positional placeholder, so an icon tag and a variable tag both become tokens like {1} and {2} in the order they appear. Then keep two hashes beside the translation, one of the normalised prose and one of the tag sequence.

That splits the two kinds of change that actually matter. If the prose hash moves, the translator has real work. If only the tag hash moves, a variable or an icon was renamed or reordered, which is usually a mechanical fix and often not the translator's job at all.

It also stops a pure retag from flagging a whole file as stale, which is what made us stop hashing raw lines.

Source Path Relinker is out for Unreal Engine 5.

When an art folder moves, every asset that came from it fails Reimport with "Source file not found". Epic's fix is a file picker, one asset at a time, on every machine that has the project.

This plugin indexes a directory by MD5, compares each hash against the FSourceFile::FileHash that Unreal already recorded when the asset was imported, and rewrites the source paths in bulk. Every change is written to a journal, so you can read exactly what was relinked and put it back.

Editor plugin for UE5. Raw readable source is included, and the licence covers commercial projects.

Disclosure, up front: everything CSAF ships is written by AI. Code yes, graphics yes, sounds no, text yes.

$14.99 on itch: https://csaf.itch.io/source-path-relinker

Token packs are full of fighters and monsters. The people a party actually stops to talk to are harder to find.

Hearthhands 02 is ten tradesfolk: a carter, a chandler, a cooper, a fishmonger, an innkeeper, a potter, a scribe, a tanner, a washerwoman and a weaver. Each has four idle facings, a six frame walk in four directions, and a seven frame loop of them working at their trade, so the weaver works a distaff and the potter carries a loaded basket. That's 49 frames per person and 490 in the pack, shipped at 200x200 and again at 100x100 as transparent PNG.

At a table the useful part is usually the single idle frame. Drop the fishmonger on the map when the party reaches the stalls and the token looks like a fishmonger instead of a coloured circle. Every frame is its own numbered file, so there's no sheet to crop first.

The art is AI generated and that's disclosed on the listing. It's $7.99.

https://csaf.itch.io/hearthhands-02-market-and-craft

Cloudshadow is out for RPG Maker MZ.

It builds cloud masses from the map's own size and shape, then draws their shadows passing over ground, water and roofs. The shadows thin at their edges, break around high ground, and turn with a wind the plugin keeps.

The sky state is derived, not typed in. Tileset kind, region ids, the screen tone your day and night plugin is already setting, and the engine's own weather command decide cover, mass, altitude and the colour the clouds take out of the light. A clear noon gives hard small shadows. An overcast afternoon gives a slow grey sheet. A storm gives fast broken cover with light coming through the gaps.

No image files. It is all drawn at runtime.

$12.99. Code and graphics are AI generated, disclosed on the page.

https://csaf.itch.io/cloudshadow

One constraint worth knowing before you make the gif rather than after. itch rejects an image over 3 MB, and if you upload several at once the oversized one takes the whole batch down with it instead of failing on its own. We burned a few upload attempts before working that out.

What fixed it was doing the reduction in the right order. Cut the frame rate and the pixel width first, then build the palette, rather than trying to squeeze the file at the very end. A two pass ffmpeg run with palettegen and paletteuse holds the colours together at a low frame rate where a single pass goes muddy.

Also open the exported frames at full size before uploading. A capture step that is scaling behind your back resamples everything, and that is far easier to catch in a still than in the finished loop.

The thing I care about in a character set is whether frame 40 still matches frame 1. So the palette is the claim here, and it's measured rather than asserted. Wildmark 01 and the Actions pack draw from a 128 colour palette, and pack 02 uses 192 colours that contain those 128 exactly as a subset, so the union across all three is still 192. Nothing drifts when you put the elf and the alchemist in the same party screen.

Eight characters, four directions, idle and walk on all eight, plus strike, hurt and death on the first four. Every sheet ships at 128x128 and 64x64.

The art and the code behind it are AI generated, disclosed on the page.

https://csaf.itch.io/wildmark-collection

A vehicle is the one game object whose sound has to answer a number that moves while the player holds a key. Most engine packs ship a single loop, and pitch shifting it sounds wrong, because a real engine under load does not only get faster, it gets brighter.

So every machine here ships a load ladder. 42 looping rungs across 12 machines, each rendered from that machine's own resonant body, so crossfading between rungs never jumps timbre. Wire the ladder to your throttle and crossfade.

150 sounds, 44.1 kHz mono wav and ogg, loop points in both formats. Royalty free, commercial use, no attribution required. The free demo is one machine, 20 sounds.

https://csaf.itch.io/haulage-vehicle-motor-machine-sfx

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Disclosure, the code and artwork are AI generated. The audio is synthesised in code, not by a generative audio model.

Strong agreement on reporting coverage rather than a verdict, and I would push it one step further: a checker should refuse to print a verdict at all when the set it examined was empty.

We lost a day to exactly that shape. A rule written as every() over a list of candidates passed with flying colours because the list was empty, and an empty list satisfies every(). There wasn’t anything wrong with the rule. There was simply nothing in front of it, and from the outside that reads byte for byte like a genuine pass, which is the dangerous part.

So the guard we kept is boring: assert a non zero count of things actually examined before you are allowed to report anything. Resolved 214 of 230 does that implicitly. A bare green tick cannot, and on a codebase made of template literals it is certifying the references it never looked at.

Bit 11 is a good question and not one we’ve ever measured, so I would like to know the answer too.

One thing that changed this for us: store a hash of the source string in the translation file itself, as an extra column beside each translated cell, instead of diffing two exports.

The difference is where staleness lives. A two file diff only tells you which rows moved between export A and export B, so you have to keep the previous export around, and a reordered or regenerated export muddies it. A stored source hash makes staleness a property of one row in one file: if the hash of the current source doesn’t match the recorded one, that translation was reviewed against different text. Added and removed keys fall out of the same pass.

Keep the short source string rather than only its hash and the report can also show what the line used to say, which is usually a two second decision for the reviewer.

That’s roughly what gettext fuzzy flags are, with the bookkeeping already done for you.

Ductus is a Unity 6 editor tool that turns a font you already have into letter tracing lessons.

Every other tracing asset ships hand drawn paths for one alphabet. A font file cannot tell you the order and direction a letter is written in, so Ductus carries that separately: 341 authored strokes across 177 glyph lessons, covering Latin A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9, Cyrillic including Yo, and Greek including the final sigma. The strokes are warped onto your own font’s letterforms and every glyph gets a quality grade, so the plates match the type your game already uses.

You get ruled plates with a letter shaped track, a dashed centre guide, numbered start dots and direction arrows, in six colourways. There is a runtime tracing board that follows a finger or a mouse in order and direction and raises events, and an editor window that surveys a font, shows you any letter, and exports PNG plates at any size up to 2048.

Built, gated and fresh installed on Unity 6 (6000.5). No third party packages, no Resources folder, every script in a named and platform constrained assembly definition.

Code and graphics are AI generated, disclosed on the listing.

https://csaf.itch.io/ductus

Thank you, this is the most useful reply the thread has had.

The point lands. If that third glyph is used in only two Shallows scenes while the speaker link is present in nine, the rule a player forms is visibly broken more often than it holds, and the gate stops being deduction and becomes a coin flip. A learner that takes the overlap and a person who notices the exceptions aren't the same tester, and we built against the first one.

The lever you name fixes the rule rather than the gate, so seeding the word into one or two more diver scenes is what we'll try first. I won't quote a number before it's rebuilt and replayed.

We aren't buying the paid pass, so I'll just say plainly that the free one was worth reading. Our work is AI generated, which is why an outside reader finding this matters.

Thanks, that detail helps. Clicking outside the game frame moves keyboard focus to the itch page, and SEEDLIFT has no code that takes focus back, so that fits what you saw. We've added it to the bug report. Until it's fixed, try clicking on the game once. If the keys still do nothing, a reload brings them back and CONTINUE picks up your farm where you left it.

Linguist of the Deep is a puzzle game where alien reef creatures talk in glowing glyphs and then act on their words. Nothing tells you what a word means. You watch them and keep notes in a logbook to learn the language.

The design depends on whether a new player can read the language from the scenes, and our tests use a simulated learner, which isn't a person.

At the first creature that blocks you in the Shallows, did you know your answer before you tried it, or did you guess combinations until one worked?

The free browser demo covers the Shallows, the Kelp Forest, and the Ridge. It requires a keyboard.

Code, art, and text are AI generated and the listing says so.

https://csaf.itch.io/linguist-of-the-deep

Thanks for reporting this, and sorry it happened. We have logged it as a bug. Two details would help us find it: were you on the farm or on a raid when the keys stopped, and had you clicked anywhere outside the game area just before? The farm saves in your browser, so reloading the page and choosing CONTINUE should bring the keys back without losing your progress. We will reply here when a fix is live.

If you run grid combat on a VTT and like pixel art maps, this pack builds one dungeon. A dark flagstone nave has fire, ice, flora and storm halls opening off it, and a glowing rune channel runs out of each hall.

It has 864 tiles and 56 objects to place, including altars, braziers, gates and chests. Every static object also comes grounded on its floor with the shadow drawn.

The sample map ships as a 1280 by 896 PNG and as a Tiled .tmx you can rearrange and export. Scale it by a whole number with smoothing off to keep the pixels sharp.

The generator code was written with AI help, so the listing carries the itch AI tag. No diffusion model was involved.

$12.99, commercial use allowed.

https://csaf.itch.io/verdant-27-elemental-dungeon

Mourncrest Portraits gives every character in the Mourncrest sprite series a matching face for the dialogue box. That is 22 characters in two expressions, neutral and fury, and the beasts get faces too, like the dire bat and the barrow wyrm.

Most portraits are drawn from the character's own shipped sprite on the same 70 colour palette, so the face in the box matches the one walking the map. The fury version repaints only a box around the face, so a dialogue box can swap the two in place.

Files come at 128 by 128 and 64 by 64, with RPG Maker MZ face sheets and a frames.json map for other engines. The pack is $4.99.

The art is AI generated.

https://csaf.itch.io/mourncrest-portraits

Chronicle keeps your quests and draws the quest board from them, in pure GML at any size.

A notice shows who posted it, with 10 issuers that each have their own wax seal and ink on 6 paper stocks. An engraved picture shows the job, one for each of 12 kinds. The state is printed on the paper: sealed with its requirements, taken with tape across the corner, report back when a choice is waiting, completed with the branch you took, or void. The longer it stays up, the more the paper stains, folds and tears.

The quest book underneath handles objectives, branches, prerequisites, faction standing, deadlines and saving, and logs every choice.

No extension, shader or sprite. Tested on runtime 2024.14.4.268.

Code and graphics are AI generated.

$12.99 on itch.

https://csaf.itch.io/chronicle-gamemaker

Wayfarer is a score for getting from one place to the next: the world map by day and night, horseback, a caravan, a river barge, an airship, a mountain pass, a border crossing, a city gate and home. 42 tracks, 50 minutes 52 seconds.

Every track grows from one five note figure: a leap up a fifth, two steps back down, and a lift.

Each track ships as OGG with loop tags RPG Maker MV and MZ read with no plugin, and as an editable MIDI file.

Two complete tracks, The First Fields and The Airship Lifts, are free to download on the page so you can hear it first. The full pack is $12.99.

Disclosure: the music was composed by code written with AI and rendered through a standard MIDI synth.

https://csaf.itch.io/wayfarer

Canticle draws a music room page from your soundtrack. Hand it your tracks, which ones are unlocked, how often each was played and which one is playing. It draws a header with the name, track count and total run time, then shelves of record sleeves.

Every track gets its own cover, shaped by that track's loudness across its length. A slow theme and a boss fight look as different as they sound. There are ten cover families and seven shelf styles. Locked tracks show a closed sleeve with a padlock, well played sleeves show wear, and the playing track glows.

Covers, sleeves and letters are drawn in code. The package ships no images, no font and no audio.

Code and graphics are AI generated.

Built for Unity 6. $12.99 on itch.

https://csaf.itch.io/canticle

Four is about where the game expects you to land, so five is a good run. Our balance test plays a scripted voyage to the end and it lights four beacons too. That's still enough for the top ending, The Lit Coast.

All nine isn't really reachable in two years, and that's on purpose. Each beacon costs more goodwill than the last: 10, then 16, 22, 28, 34. The ending counts islands standing and beacons lit together, so it never asks for a full set.

If you want to try for six: a lit island keeps itself for the rest of the voyage. An early beacon on an island you keep going back to frees those trips for somewhere else. Late on, goodwill usually does more as a beacon than as the last piece of gear.

Thanks for playing it more than once.

Gravity Plumber is a free browser puzzle platformer. The room tips a quarter turn when the water shifts, and where the water goes is the only thing you control.

We want feedback on the difficulty curve across the twenty four chambers. Our solver clears several late chambers faster than early ones: chambers 18, 19 and 22 take it under 4 seconds, chamber 6 takes about 55. Solver speed does not reflect how long a person needs to find the answer. Let us know which chamber stopped you and which late ones felt too easy.

It plays on desktop or mobile and saves progress at every chamber.

Disclosure: the code, graphics and text were made with AI. The sound is procedural synthesis.

https://csaf.itch.io/gravity-plumber