itch.io

If you’re trying to advertise your pirate site through reverse psychology, I think you’re in the wrong place.

No AI disclosure. Hard pass.

Yes, it briefly flashed in the top-left corner of the screen, while I was busy navigating to the bottom-right corner of the screen to activate full screen. I didn’t see it the first time, and I barely had time to see it the second time.

Doesn’t respond to arrow keys. Doesn’t respond to mouse. Doesn’t respond to gamepad. I’m about to give up.

OK, it does respond to wasd. But at this point, I already stopped caring.

I died a bunch of times on the first jump before I quit.

This game is not at all what I’m looking for in a platformer. I like platformers, but I don’t want to be seriously challenged by them, and I’m not particularly good at playing them either. Some light challenge here and there is OK, but I’m primarily playing for the scenery (if it’s pretty), the plot (if there is one), the puzzles (if there are any), and the joy of moving freely through the world. A lot of beginner game designers that a game has to be difficult in order to be taken seriously, but aside of a few hardcore gamer who thrive on challenge, that’s not what the general audience wants at all.

• Your stuff got scraped.

So you know that AI is based on stolen art, and you still use it.

If there’s really no connection, then find a different name. Like “Ultimate Fantasy Blue” or “Last Fantasy Blue”, or just change the word order and call it “Final Blue Fantasy” if you’re set on calling it final. But I’m almost certain that “Ultimate Fantasy” has been used before, multiple times, so maybe not that.

If there is a connection, then it’s a fan game. There are lots of fan games on itch, but they get taken down when the rights holder complains. Your decision if it’s worth the risk to you.

Then Newgrounds will be dead, and it will be the fault of people like you who killed it. Manual moderation is hard and thankless work, but without it the community either dies from spam or from blocking legitimate discussion. You can see this happening right here on itch.

Emscripten.

True, there are great games with minimal art, although I wouldn’t put Thomas Was Alone or Mini Metro among them. I’m thinking more along the lines of ZZT or classic Tetris.

Laziness is the virtue of accomplishing more with less effort. We should all aspire to be lazier. Just not when it involves stealing from artists. AI gives laziness a bad name.

Your game is not played, because you have no files on your project. You are not at the point where small details like a game engine would matter in any way.

What? No, you decide on which game engine you use before you invest years of your time making the game. You upload your game after you invest years of your time making the game, when you actually have something to show.

Getting back to the issue at hand, I’ve played lots of RPGMaker games that I’ve really enjoyed, along with a few that I didn’t particularly enjoy. So if anything, I’d say that RPGMaker is a plus for me. That said, stock RPGMaker combat tends to suck, and many of my favorite RPGMaker games either heavily customized the combat or left it out entirely.

To the Moon is great. Lonely Wolf Treat is great. A Bird Story is great. Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is great. Ara Fell is great. Ao Oni is great. Rakuen is great. It’s games like these that I associate with the RPGMaker name. I’m sure lots of crap exists as well, but I rarely encounter it, and when I do, it doesn’t stick in my memory.

Not sure I agree with either of those suggestions, and they seem to push in opposite directions. The high level of detail on the insects keeps the focus on the insects, and the low level of detail on the background allows the insects to stand out. I can read the scene just fine the way it is.

I would remove that factory-like structure from the left side of the background. Unless the game is about dystopian industrial hellscapes (which can ironically be quite pretty), nobody wants to look at a factory. Replace it with a ruined castle or something, or just leave it out entirely. The two background features, the farm and the factory, create a fairly symmetrical composition right now, and symmetrical is boring. I also think that the transition between the green field in the foreground and the much darker and less saturated background higher up is a bit too abrupt. Maybe bring those colors closer together, or add an intermediate color in between.

Promoting your own content (or the contents of your close friends) is strictly forbidden.

I’m just bitter that I can’t get my pixel art game, which runs at full 60fps natively, to run at more than 3fps in a web browser (running the exact same code on the same hardware) - and that’s after extensive optimization for the web platform. I already have native builds for Linux and Windows and they run fine. What other platforms do you offer? Macintosh? Playstation? Nintendo Switch? NetBSD? Haiku? DOS?

The web is a horrible platform to develop for. Terrible performance, terrible debugging support, browser incompatibilities, security issues, can’t even control the main loop of the game. The only reason I bother with it is so that anybody can play my games, directly in a web browser, without downloading it and without additional third-party software. So what’s the value proposition for removing that only advantage?

I think you should draw a clearer distinction between “you” (the player) and “your character” (the character the player is playing). Never use “you” to refer to the character, and explain at the beginning that the character the player is playing is a literary character in a different world with a different personality, values, and religion from the player. That would allow you to sidestep all of that coddling to religious sensitivities. Because I find this level of coddling offensive.

Different religions exist, in the real world and in fiction. Different people have different religions. Anybody who has a problem with that is not worth coddling, and isn’t going to play a secular fantasy rpg anyway. But if you have a fictional religion in your game, then you need to actually develop it, with specific beliefs, values and practices, instead of just leaving it up to the player.

The alternative is to just not have a religion in the game. Which is still going to offend the bible thumpers whining about the secularization of society.

It’s not just lazy, it’s evil. Releasing a game with minimal art or no art at all is lazy. Not releasing a game at all but watching TV all day instead is lazy. Releasing a game with art created by an AI that’s trained on art stolen from real artists, who now need to compete with a remix of their own art, that’s evil.

It’s definitely AI Generated Code.

If it’s also AI generated art is a more complex issue, and depends on what the code is actually doing and how many of the creative decisions were left up to the AI. Do you understand the code? Did you pick or design the algorithms? Could you have coded it from scratch, given the time and effort? Would it have produced the same results if you did code it from scratch? If your answer to all these questions is “yes”, then it’s not AI generated art. I’ll just boycott it for containing AI generated code instead.

To me, rougelite games are defined by the following characteristics:

• Random world.
• Random challenges.
• Random loot/progression within a run.
• Permadeath within a run.
• Relatively short runs.
• You lose more runs than you win.
• Slow progression across runs, requiring you to play the game over and over again to unlock new content.

None of that is appealing to me. I like worlds that are worth committing to long term memory. I like challenges and loot to be balanced, and I like being able to plan ahead using the foreknowledge of what the challenges and loot are going to be. I like being able to see the good end of the game on my first run. I like long, epic games. I like putting the game away after my first run and starting a new game.

I never played Binding of Isaac, and based on its gross-out themes, I probably never will. I’m barely aware of Slay the Spire, although I’ve heard the name before. But I think I’ve played enough roguelikes and roguelites (ADOM, FTL, Dicey Dungeons, Darkest Dungeon) to know that they’re not my cup of tea.

The one roguelite I played recently that I actually enjoyed and played all the way to the end (of the plot, without all unlocks) was Desktop Dungeons. I liked how it balanced its random map generation with the most non-random combat system ever: I could calculate exactly how each battle would end, down to the last hit point, before even starting the fight.

Obvious problems:

• The text is too small to read in windowed mode.
• When in full-screen mode, pressing ESC takes me to windowed mode, and not back up the menu as expected. (Running on Firefox.)

While being able to exclude tags is very useful, your AI filtering is wrong. No AI disclosure doesn’t mean the game has no AI, it just means the developer didn’t fill out the AI disclosure. When I filter by No AI, I only want to see games that did fill out the AI disclosure, and deliberate chose the No AI option.

If it’s not linked to an account but you still control the email address you used to buy it, you can recover your purchase here.

If it’s still in your library, you can find it like this:

• Go to your library (from the drop-down menu at the top right corner of the screen).
• Go to My Purchases from the menu in the left.
• Go to the Bundles tab (near the top of the screen).
• Search for Black Lives Matter using the browser’s search function (ctrl+f), or just scroll the list until you find it.

If it’s not there, then there’s a possibility that you used a different account to buy it.

One of the things that puts me off from buying games on itch is that even the good ones tend to be too short. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with short games per se, but if I spend money, I want to get my money’s worth. There are enough free short games available that I don’t need to buy more. Quality is more important than quantity, but quantity still matters, and more quantity is generally a good thing.

I’ve written some short-form games, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable selling them. All of my games on itch should take over eight hours to finish, depending on playing style. Speedrunners can do it faster, completionists can take far longer.

When browsing, you absolutely need to turn on the No-AI tag. This filters out all everything that has disclosed AI usage, and everything that hasn’t filled out the AI disclosure. Unlike most other tags, this does not filter out assets that don’t have the tag in its tag list. The AI disclosure tags are special that way. If it’s too much of a pain to turn on that tag each time you browse, try bookmarking the browse page with the tag already selected. There, problem solved. Unfortunately this does not work with text search because there is no way to combine text search with tags.

Actually, itch is one of the very few asset stores I even bother with anymore, precisely because it makes it relatively easy to filter out AI slop. Most other asset stores I tried have don’t have AI disclosures at all.

What’s the point of that reply? OP can decide for themselves if they want to accept the game or not. If you think that OP is being too unspecific about what they ask for and too picky about what they accept, I agree - but either address OP directly or butt out of the conversation. Hassling third parties because they engage with OP is just harassment.

My time to shine?

https://eldwood.itch.io/feynas-quest

https://eldwood.itch.io/lightslayer

I like strategy. I like base-building. I like bronze-age warfare. I can go either way on tactical RPG: it’s only interesting if all of the battles are hand-designed, well-balanced, and substantially different from one another. Too many tactical RPGs make me fight what is essentially the same battle over and over, which is a waste of my time.

But you’ve already lost me at “roguelite”. Sorry, not interested.

Just use a screen shot. It’ll accurately represent your game, and it’ll probably look better than AI slop too.

Why would you go to the trouble of creating an AI-free game and then ruin it with an AI cover image?

I like the bottom one. The top right can be read as a wheel and the top left can be read as a spider web, but the bottom one clearly looks like a snowflake to me.

When webp was proposed in 2021, web browser support support wasn’t quite there yet. It’s 2026 now and all major web browsers have supported webp for years. How much longer do we have to wait?

Curiously how your interpretaion of law still is not working to forbid ai or ai training, is it.

The typical defense of AI art is that it’s not derivative art but wholly original. Which I think is bullshit, and you seem to think is bullshit, and a whole bunch of other people think is bullshit. But we’re not the ones with the big army of lawyers and we don’t have the courts in our pocket, so the AI companies win. For now. Laws can change, and there’s a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the streets.

One confounding factor is that it’s often incredibly hard to prove where a particular AI image came from. It’s like pollution: we know who’s doing it, we know it’s killing people, but it’s often impossible to match up a single death with a single polluter. Which is why we have separate laws for pollution and for murder, and why it makes more sense to go after the training than after the final product.

At other times, finding the source of an AI image isn’t hard at all.

Your page is seriously cringe. Between the AI-generated-looking banner, the constant use of double asterisks for emphasis, and the keyword-laden feature list with little up-front explanation of what your tool actually does, it reads like something a SEO spam AI would write.

I think this may be why your page was marked for manual review instead just being automatically indexed.

I did not cite a collage to argue that ai are collages.

And indeed they are not. Collages, unlike AI images, contain creative input beyond their source material, which qualifies them for copyright protection separate from their source material.

Using material for training an ai is currently also ruled as derivative.

Is that what you meant to say? Because it completely undermines your previous arguments.

Derivative works are still bound by the terms of the copyright of the source material. If I create a game that incorporates GPL-licensed code, I have created a derivative work, and I am bound to release my game source code under the terms of the GPL. Furthermore, under United States copyright law, copyright ownership in a derivative work attaches only if the derivative work is lawful, because of a license or other “authorization.”.

But AI images are not derivative works because they are not works in the first place. They are merely derivative. In the US, the output of an algorithm not copyrightable separately from the input.

Well, in my opinion, the morally wrong thing here is not the training of ai. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. But rather the replacement of human work by ai output.

Using procedural art instead of of hiring an artist is not immoral. Using photographs instead of paintings isn’t immoral. Respectfully using public domain art isn’t immoral. Making a text-based game with no art at all isn’t immoral. Nobody is obligated to be a patron of the arts. None of these are based on stealing.

Meanwhile the ai output of such models would still replace human work.

You have no idea how much work goes into training an AI before it starts producing useful output, do you? If each AI were trained only on commissioned artwork produced for that AI, the AI companies could employ every artist on Earth and the AIs still wouldn’t be as good as what we have now.

Look up, what a collage is as an example how weird copyright is.

Creating a physical collage is not copyright infringement because no copying is involved, even at the “copying into memory” level. But the creator does not hold sole copyright over the result. You can’t use collage to wash off copyright. The creator doesn’t need copyright in order to display their work.

Collage on a computer, you might be able to get away with it by arguing fair use, depending on the jurisdiction and the lawyers involved. It helps that the collage artist is actually applying their own creativity, unlike an algorithm. But the biggest protection for collage artists is that most copyright holders don’t care enough to go after them. Even if the copyright holder finds out about the collage (a big if), suing is expensive, it’s bad PR, and there’s little to gain by suing the average collage artist. Automated copyright enforcement algorithms like on YouTube absolutely will go after collages.

But my primary argument isn’t about what the law currently is, which varies a lot by jurisdiction and is generally outside of my area of expertise. My argument is about what is morally right, and what the law should be.

You seem to try reducing the work of a photographer to that of a random observer with no creative input.

You seem to be entirely incapable of nuance, after I already explicitly acknowledged the creative input that goes into a photograph.

Photography fits on the spectrum of art forms. It goes below “accurate” painting from life, which in turn goes below fantasy painting. It probably goes above coloring in coloring books, but I would never say that coloring in coloring books involves no creative input.

On a technical level the copyright issue is factual wrong.

On a technical level you have a machine where you feed pictures in on one end and different pictures come out the other end. Put nothing in, and nothing comes out. The output is in the most literal sense a function of the input. Sometimes the output doesn’t look a lot like the input (although it usually looks like some combination of its inputs, because the algorithm has no creativity of its own). A zip file also doesn’t look a lot like its input. At other times the relationship is obvious. Generative AI has been known to quote its training data.

You claim that you’re not an AI advocate, but you also claim that it’s possible to wash off the authorship and copyright of a work by passing it through an algorithm. Your criticism of AI basically amounts to “this soylent green tastes bland”.

Just checked, and it looks like the kernel itself now allows AI-tainted code. Time to start using NetBSD?

Systemd has a permissive AI policy, so be sure to run one of the systemd-free distributions.

(Disclaimer: this one’s on my to-do list, but right now I’m running Linux Mint (which uses systemd) on my primary machine.)

That’s $5.83 per hour. Minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. It is literally illegal to pay that little in the US, and the US does not have good labor protection laws.