Your link is deceptive.  The url in the link text isn't the url the link points to.

The difficult thing about save systems is that they affect all other parts of your game architecture.  If you don't design with saving in mind from the start, you are going to run into a dead end.

For example, coroutines are good tool for structuring game logic that runs over extended periods of time, like scripted scenes for example.  If you haven't used them before, coroutines are basically functions that can be suspended and resumed later.  I like coroutines.  The problem is that in most programming languages that support coroutines, there is no way to save the state of a coroutine.  So if you've got a coroutine running and you save the game and quit, there is no way to resume the coroutine when the game is loaded.  If the coroutine was doing something important, this breaks the game.

For my previous project, I had to write my own scripting language in order to get coroutines whose state can be saved and restored.  It was fun to program and definitely worth it, but it was also a lot more work than simply integrating an off-the-shelf scripting language.  And in this case I knew ahead of time that I would need my own scripting language to get what I wanted.  I didn't have to rewrite anything because I knew the issues I would face ahead of time.

If I had the game using Python coroutines for scripting, for example, I would have had to dump all of that work and start over when it came time to write the save system.  And that would have been hell.

Serbian and Croatian are also treated as separate languages by itch.

I know it's possible to filter by language on itch, but the process for doing so is ridiculously difficult.  There is no way to do so from the main games page.  There is not even a way to do so from the Directory.  Instead, I have to do this:

• Somehow find a game, any game, in the language I want.  Sometimes I can use the language name as either a search term or a tag.
• Click on More Information.
• Hope the developer of the game filled out the language metadata.  (Only a minority of developers seem to have done this, even for games in minority languages.  I had to look at several Welsh games before I found one that actually listed the language as a language instead of a tag.)
• Click on the language.
• Skip over the all the games whose developers thought they could be clever and select all languages, even though the game itself is mostly textless.
• Even changing the UI language doesn't change this.  I have to jump through hoops to find a German game with my UI language set to German.

Surely the user experience can be improved here.  Am I the only person who cares about this?

Shouldn't Interslavic be treated as two languages, divided by alphabet (Latin or Cyrillic)? By comparison, Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional) are also treated as two languages despite being different writing systems for the same language.

Frankly I'd rather you didn't use music at all.  Having to pause my CD just because I'm playing a game is annoying.  But if you feel the need to add music to your game, free stock music isn't hard to find, and there are even plenty of composers willing to work for free.

I know AI disclosure is optional for games, but the first thing I do when I look at a game page is to look for the AI disclosure, and if it doesn't say that no generative AI was used, I move on.  Refusing to disclose that you use AI isn't going to make me give your game a chance, and refusing to disclose that you didn't use AI is just going to scare away potential players/customers.

Please fill out the AI disclosure on all projects you upload, regardless of type.  It's for you own benefit, as well as the benefit of everyone who comes to your project page.

No, that's not acceptable, and I hope you get your money back.  That said, most (possible all, but I didn't check all) of these tilesets are clearly marked as AI-assisted (click next to More information near the bottom of the page to see the AI disclosure), so it's kind of your own fault for not paying attention to what you're buying.

I noticed the same thing on my page, so it's not just you.

You're getting your time wasted?  No, you're the one wasting the time of the moderators who have to delete the feces you're smearing all over their communities.

I don't mind self-promotion when it answers an actual question, but please be up-front about it.  You're not recommending a third-party service you've used, you're promoting your own service.  Oh, and you're responding to a year-old thread.

For a budget PC, you can often get a better value buying used than new.

Whether you try to design up-front with a design document before production starts or you design on the fly as you're programming, you're still designing.  And in my experience, designing is always the hardest part of game development.

Getting into a game jam as a beginning designer who only designs would be difficult, not because design is unimportant, but because it's too important to trust a beginner.

I distribute my games with music in opus format, which I have found gives the best quality to file size ratio.  However, I prefer to do my own compression so that I can control the compression level.  I use flac exclusively during development, which offers good compression with perfect (losssless) quality.

I can convert other lossless formats (e.g. wav) to flac if I have to.  I refuse to use other lossy formats like mp3 and ogg.

That's actually deliberate.  There's a checkbox when creating a 100% off sale, checked by default, that allows people to claim the game.  If the checkbox is not checked, the game can be downloaded for free but can't be claimed.

.webm is a video format that can include audio.  On a properly configured web browser, it should require an extra click to play because it is never acceptable for a web browser to auto-play videos with audio.  It is therefore not a replacement for animated image formats (gif, apng) which never contain audio and can be auto-played.

(Lossless) .webp, on the other hand, should be the default image format everywhere.

I didn't download it, but I can already tell I wouldn't like it from the animated GIF.

• It's too fast.  I know that fast is what you're going for, and I know that some people like fast, but it just makes me feel dizzy.
• The environment looks boring and artificial and not at all like what I'd imagine a gnome underworld to look like.  Yes, I realize that it's all placeholder graphics, but I can only judge what I can see.

I play fps games for the environments and the environmental storytelling.  Not so much for the combat, and especially not for combat that's so fast that you don't have time to think and strategize.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, but it's not for me.

Unless you're as big as Steam, nobody is going to pay to get on your platform.  If you're smaller than itch, you may actually have to pay an advance on royalties in order to interest developers.

I don't like this, because it legitimizes not correctly marking platforms on the part of the developer.  If you see an incorrectly marked game, report it!

Itch could also do a better job of catching incorrectly marked games.  If it contains a .exe file, it's probably a Windows download even if the developer didn't mark it as such (although it could also be a DOS download).

Not a big deal, but I find it annoying when I see a thread with the blue "New" label, click on "last page", and only see the (old) initial post because the thread has replies hidden.  Example: https://itch.io/t/1659440/psa-beware-the-try-my-game-scam.  For threads where replies are hidden, I would rather only see the "New" label when the original post has been edited. 

I would barely consider it a restriction at all.  Just don't use recorded music, stick to pixel art, and don't use oversize game engines or libraries.  A 10MB game doesn't have to be a "small" game.  I can work for years on such a game without hitting the limit.

Interesting observation: Feyna's Quest, one of my previous games, has a web demo and a downloadable demo.  The downloadable demo for 64 bit Windows is 12.7MB, most of which is the executable.  The same demo for the web platform, containing the same data, is only 3.1MB, with the main executable (.wasm file) still making up most of the size.  The complete assets of the game make up less than 1MB for the demo, 2MB for the full game.  It's getting hard to keep file sizes below 10MB for desktop platforms, but not at all difficult to do the same for web games.

All SNES games were smaller than 10MB.  The largest, Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean, were 6MB.

That's not a good analogy, because a motorbike isn't "trained" on the athletic output of other people.  There is nothing inherently unethical about a motorbike race.

Better analogy: why can't I just use my slave-carried palanquin in the Olympics?

For what it's worth: Bandcamp has a shopping cart feature while still forcing you to pay for every band separately.  When you check out, instead of making one big payment with Paypal, you get repeatedly sent to Paypal to make a smaller payment to different sellers until you've payed for everything in your cart.

While making lots of small payments instead of a big one seems to defeat the purpose of a shopping cart, it doesn't really:

• Multiple purchases by the same seller are grouped as one payment.
• You can add things that you think you want to your shopping cart and remove them again when you change your mind later, so long as you do it before checking out.
• You can see how much money you're about to spend as a lump sum, and remove things from your shopping cart when you're going over budget.
• The acts of choosing what to buy and paying for it are separated.  Your shopping isn't constantly interrupted by paying.

My biggest audio-related fear is loss of hearing.  I'm not deaf by any means, but I'm no longer young and I'm constantly getting older, which means that my sense of hearing is slowly deteriorating.  This means that audio that sounds fine to me might sound like crap to a younger person because it is missing higher frequencies (or, worse, contains high frequency noise) that I can no longer hear.

AI is generally banned for the same reason that other forms of plagiarism are banned.

What I actually do when I find something interesting and want to know if it's AI slop:

• Check what tags it has.
• If the "No AI" tag or the "AI generated" tag is among the tags, stop.
• Browse for the project's tags.
• Add the "No AI" tag.
• If the project shows up, I assume that it is clean.  If the project doesn't show up, I assume that it is tainted.

Needless to say, this is a completely horrible user experience, but it's the only way I know to be sure that any assets I purchase are AI-free.  I refuse to put AI slop in my games, even if it doesn't look like AI slop.

If you want tension, then a jumpscare is the last thing you want.  Jumpscares kill tension, and tension kills jumpscares.  Pick one and stick with it.

A jumpscare is ineffective if the player expects it.  A jumpscare is cheap if the player had no way to predict it.  Both are bad, but ineffective is worse.  A good jumpscare is one that catches the player off guard, but the player blames herself for lowering her guard.

The best way to make jumpscares effective is to not overuse them.  Take your old film projector example.  Played out like you describe it, everybody is going to expect a jumpscare.  So let the creatures wander off again.  Repeat a few times.  Distract the player with something else.  Only then, when the player has lowered her guard, throw the jumpscare at her.

Yes.

Does 90% bandwidth throttling really matter for itch?  This is a platform for small indie games, not 60GB AAA slop.

Some of the "DOS" games with Windows downloads are actual DOS games packaged with a Windows version of DOSBox.

I agree that situation sucks for minority platforms like DOS (and Amiga and C64 and Spectrum and NES and so on).   Ideally they would all be treated as first-class platforms instead of relying on tags.

I'm in favor of honest advertising, but I'm also in favor of a clean, readable layout.  You're right that the game itself looks fairly rough (based on the screenshots), but at the same time the game looks a lot cleaner than the background simply because there is a lot less going at the same time.

My own approach to honest advertising is to only use artwork that appears in the actual game in the promotional materials.

The problems with the background have nothing to do with "objectification".  The problems are:

• The background is so visually busy that it constantly draws my eyes away from the actual page into the margins.
• The background is, well, ugly.  Busy, noisy, roughly drawn, scenes and characters too small to comfortably make out on the screen.  The girl with the cello is the least offensive in that regard --subject matter aside, she's big, not overly detailed, and surrounded by plenty of white space, all of which adds up to her being easy on the eyes.

I just noticed that the itch.io game widgets on my website aren't working, and Firefox blames itch.io.  Exact error message:

Firefox Can’t Open This Page

To protect your security, itch.io will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window.

Context: https://eldwood.com/a-dream-of-burning-sand/

The secrets.

Visual scripting has been removed from Godot because nobody was using it.  GDScript is better for productivity anyway.

I'm not a fan of cash prizes, for two reasons:

1. I'm not a fan of competitive game jams that pick winners and losers.  I just want to make something I think is cool without worrying if it's better than anybody else's thing.
2. Once money enters the game, I feel like being paid to work.  If I'm being paid to work, I want a living wage, not a chance at $500 (which is less than minimum wage for any but the shortest of jams).

Then again, I'm not a regular participant in game jams in the first place, so feel free to ignore me.

I haven't paid more than $10 for a game in years now.  I've been disappointed by games too often to risk more than $10 on a game unless I know that I'll love it - and how can I know if I haven't played yet?

None of these would be acceptable to me.  Better to make your game without visuals at all than to taint it with AI.