itch.io

Actually I can’t, because using text search takes away the ability to filter by tag. After using text search, the only options to narrow down the search are to filter by type, platform, or price. If I could, narrow down the search by tag, I would be able to use this to filter out AI slop by picking the “No AI” tag.

The other problem with narrowing down by tag is that not every project uses tags consistently, which means that most tags filter out more than I want. Tags like “castle” and “tileset” and “pixel art” and “16x16” can cause me to miss genuine pixel art 16x16 castle tilesets. That’s not a problem for the “No AI” tag though!

Shut up and stop forcing your sexual orientation on others.

Because despite all of the focus on tags and the obvious problems with the text search, I still often get better results when looking for specific types of game assets through the text search than through tags. For example, I can find a lot of castle tilesets by doing a text search on game assets for “castle tileset”, many of which are not tagged as “castle”.

At the very least, it should be possible to filter out AI slop when using text search instead of browsing by tags.

Many people use tags for smaller platforms. Which is of course not ideal, but better (i.e. more searchable) than just putting the platforms in the game title.

I think you mean “kemonomimi”.

The artists whose work was used to train the AI.

I didn’t even notice that duplicate purchases aren’t merged. There is so much absolute garbage in my library that it’s useless for finding anything anyway, so I never look through it.

Granular admin privileges are, unfortunately, not easy at all - and in the end you’d still have to have one main administrator who can destroy the project for all other contributors.

Contributors without admin privileges at all would be a lot easier to implement, and would probably work just as well. And you can already kind of have this, by listing the contributors on the page text but not adding them to the project.

I wish AI content were treated the same as NSFW content: technically allowed on Itch, but you have to opt in to see it, and that includes both the forums and games with missing AI disclosure. (The reason I don’t want it banned outright is to discourage people from lying about their AI content.)

I seriously doubt that this traffic is coming from that many individual human users actually visiting your page. Far more likely is some sort of bot invasion, whether it’s AI crawlers or denial-of-service attacks.

I’ll pay up to $5 if I think the game is worth any money at all. $5 is the same as $1 to me, but there are a lot of free games that I’ve played for which I wouldn’t even pay $1. If I really like a pay-what-you-want game, I’ll donate $5.

I’ll pay up to $10 if I expect the game to be really good. That usually means that the developer has a history of creating games that I really like, but it can also means that I downloaded the demo and fell in love with it. Very rarely I’ll pay that much for a game based on hype alone.

I have paid more than $10 for a game before, but not in the last decade or so. Maybe if one of my all-time favorite games got a sequel, and I have reason to believe that the sequel is even better than the original.

$20 is my absolute limit. Any game priced above $20 that’s worth playing will eventually go on sale for below $20, so I’ll just wait for that to happen.

If it contains any AI generated content at all, including code, I refuse to try it and block the creator if they post in the forums.

Wow, we disagree almost completely on what makes a game good! For me:

The perfect game is complete. It doesn’t have or need updates. It doesn’t have or need fan content. It doesn’t need online walkthroughs or strategy guides. It doesn’t need internet access and it doesn’t need other players. It is perfect the way it is, with no extras, just me and my computer with the game on my computer.

The perfect game has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And when I reach the end, I feel satisfied. I can put the game aside and start playing another game. I should treasure the time I spent playing the game, but I shouldn’t feel compelled to return to it.

The perfect game doesn’t block my way to the end. The game can require skill, but it can never require more skill than I can give it. If I get stuck, it’s the responsibility of the game to get me unstuck before I give up on the game.

The perfect game is a story where I play the main character. Which means both having a story in the first place and giving me the choices to do what I think the main character would do. It doesn’t mean giving me the freedom to deliberately sabotage the story, but it does mean that the game should never force the idiot ball on me.

The perfect game is a story in which I am emotionally invested. Just having a story is not enough. It must be a story that I actually care about.

The perfect game doesn’t judge. It’s OK for actions in the game to have natural consequences, but I don’t want my performance to be rated.

The perfect game is fun. Which is a really vague criterion because there are many types of fun. It’s also only one criterion among many.

The perfect game is beautiful. Another really vague criterion, but one that rules out the far-too-many games that think “ugly” is a valid aesthetic choice.

You can see the most popular game engines on Itch, along with numbers showing how popular they are, here: https://itch.io/game-development/engines

The official documentation /should/ match Godot exactly (so long as you’re looking at the same version of the documentation as the version of Godot that you are using). If you found an error in the documentation, you can and should report it here, and if you have a specific question, you can ask it here.

As for other sources, I have read some books (Godot Engine Game Development Projects by Chris Bradfield and Game Development with Blender and Godot by Kumsal Obuz) but they are both old enough by now that I wouldn’t recommend them anymore. I haven’t really kept track of new Godot books and tutorials aimed at beginners since I am no longer a beginner. Sorry.

Posted one day ago, and already closed for submissions…

Human mythology about non-human creatures that are not animals, does not talk about them having regular cities in the human style.

Human mythology usually talks very little about how non-humans live, but even so it’s not that hard to find counter-examples. Amaravati for one. Also many ruined cities were once believed by the locals to have been built and inhabited by non-humans.

But we’re talking about fantasy elves, which have evolved to have their own set of tropes separate from their Norse mythology origin. And elven cities are one of those tropes, one that was there from Tolkien’s time and has been used almost universally ever since.

Not even all human societies build cities for that matter. Smaller dwellings are not cities. And nomads do not have those either.

Yes, and fantasy elves are almost never portrayed as similar to those human societies. Elves are not country bumpkins, that’s more of a halfling trope. They are not barbarians, that’s more of an orc trope. They are often the most “civilized” race in the setting, a model for what human society should be (in the eyes of the author). Which can mean being “closer to nature” in some sense, but in a civilized way that does not preclude building cities.

Look, there are millions of websites and just a few browsers. While it would be great if those millions would all cater to all possible disabilities, this is realistically not going to happen. Meanwhile, the web browsers already have the features you are looking for, you just need to use them.

You complain about having difficulties with the pixel font, but that’s just one disability to cater for. What about people who can’t read the default font either, but need a dyslexic-friendly font? What about people who need large text? What about people who can’t read at all and need audio? What about people who don’t understand the language of the website? It’s not realistic for a simple game page to handle all of these cases, but it is realistic for a web browser to handle most or all of them, and most web browsers do.

Besides, the ultimate responsibility for creating a legible page lies with the people creating those pages, not with Itch. Itch is just providing the tools.

Which is not to say that Itch couldn’t or shouldn’t do more for accessibility. There are all kinds of features that Itch could and should provide, but don’t.

I publish on Steam (in addition to Itch), but I would never ever buy a game there. I’m not spending money on a game that requires an internet service to run.

Ironically, I have used Steam to try out demos. If I liked the demo, I bought the full game on GOG or Itch, because I like to actually own things that I buy.

It is humans that live in cities. All the non humans, the mythical creatures live elsewhere.

Most Dungeon and Dragons campaign worlds that have elves and cities have elven cities. Warhammer has elven cities. Even Dragon Age had elven cities before the humans destroyed them. I’m having trouble thinking of any mainstream fantasy examples of elves who don’t and never have lived in cities. Maybe some tiny jrpgs where there a handful of cities on the entire world map. And dwarves stereotypically live in cities - it’s only in settings that deliberately go against the standard fantasy conventions that they don’t.

Elven cities typically don’t look like human cities, but have their own architectural style which may or may not involve tree houses. They’re still cities.

Dwarves are popular because of Dwarf Fortress, which was popular enough to create a wave of followers. These followers are basically Dwarf Fortress fan games that don’t even try to hide it by using some other fantasy race than dwarves. If it had been called Troll Fortress or Orc Fortress or Goblin fortress, we would now be seeing waves of troll or orc or goblin games. You wouldn’t even need to change the mechanics, because colonizing and mining are things that trolls and orcs and goblins often do in standard fantasy settings.

Also, Tolkien’s elves were very much city dwellers during the First and Second Ages. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy take place near the end of the Third Age when most of the elves had already left for the Blessed Realm, leaving just a few token settlements on Middle-Earth.

The images in your post are not loading for me.

Not all jams are listed in the calendar. I suspect that the reason is that there are just too many jams to list them all. Being unlisted doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, it just means that you weren’t picked. Don’t rely on the calendar to communicate when the jam takes place.

That said…

The jam has the ‘unlisted’ box checked so I can’t see a reason for it to be excluded.

Unless you mistyped and meant “unchecked”, that would be the reason.

Sounds like a browser issue, not an Itch issue. In Firefox, if you go to Settings > Accessibility and click on Advanced Settings, you can disable all custom fonts for all websites. I assume that other browsers have similar settings. On the same Settings > Accessibility page there’s also an option to turn off custom colors for websites. If those are too coarse for you, there are also more nuanced extensions that allow you to change just specific fonts on specific sites.

However, several hours later, the game still does not appear in the recent/updated listings.

Try weeks.

In your benchmarks, you acknowledge that pairwise diffs can produce smaller downloads, then dismiss them because you need N² of diffs. That’s technically true if you want to go from one arbitrary version to any other arbitrary version in one step, but nobody actually uses pairwise diffs that way.

The most common use of pairwise diffs only creates diffs between adjacent pairs, because by far the most common use case is going from one version to the next version. This provides optimal download sizes so long as no versions are skipped. Only N diffs are needed.

If skipping versions is common, one neat trick is to only provide power-of-two diffs between versions that are themselves powers of 2, i.e. pairwise diffs between adjacent diffs in the sequences 0-1-2-3-4-…, 0-2-4-6-8-10…, 0-4-8-16-32…, 0-8-16-32-64… and so on. This only requires 2N diffs and allows you to move between arbitrary versions with only O(2 log M) steps, where M is the distance between the versions.

Finally, if new versions are very frequent and very similar to each other, there’s always the trick of setting one version (the first one, or the one after the last major change) as the “base” version and only storing diffs to and from the base version. This only requires N diffs (recalculated each time the base version changes) and 2 diffs to change from one arbitrary version to another arbitrary version, at the cost of potentially very large diffs.

And I want to sell them that way! Not as a replacement for digital downloads, but as another option. I miss having physical objects that can be gift-wrapped and displayed on shelves. I miss having physical proof that I actually own the game and didn’t just download it from a pirate site. I miss feelies.

Unfortunately the logistics are against me. Printing custom USB-sticks with game artwork is expensive, especially in small runs. Shipping, especially international shipping, is expensive. It’s also real work. Getting a shipping address from customers is difficult. And my games don’t sell in large enough numbers to justify any of that.

He’s not just offering, he’s already done it.

I would hope I wouldn’t have to explain the benefits of physical media, but for those who advocate for an all digital future, ask yourself if you are okay with the idea of corporate overlords taking away from you what you have purchased.

That has nothing to do with physical games, but with DRM. My multiply-backed-up DRM-free downloads are much safer than my physical game purchases. Physical media degrade, and if I only have one copy, that copy can be stolen or destroyed. And even if the media themselves last, the devices to run them might no longer be available. I still have games on floppies from that era, but I no longer have floppy drives. My digital collection will almost certainly outlast Sony and all of the other purveyors of DRM-locked crap. Nobody can take it away from me.

You have a fairly rigid, orderly layout: image divided at horizontal and vertical center lines, text straight and centered. On the other hand, there are little things that seem “off” from an orderly perspective: the right side isn’t divided into two images like the left side, and the top line of text goes much farther over the center than the bottom line of text.

You can either try to “fix” the orderly layout or you can go the other way and make everything more dynamic and a bit chaotic. Given the subject matter, I recommend the latter. Put the text on a curve, or just rotate it a bit. If you need to split your image into multiple fields, divide along diagonal lines and don’t make the fields the same size.

I take it that by hand-painted, you mean “created on a computer, using digital paint tools, but without AI” and not “actually painted on an actual physical canvas with actual physical paint”? It’s cool either way, but I associate the term “hand-painted” more with the latter than with the former.

For me, it’s the opposite. Until the game is completely playable from beginning to end, with the plot complete, the game doesn’t feel like a game to me. It feels like a prototype, a tech demo, and I have no interest whatsoever in working on prototypes. So the first few years (yes, years) working on a game are a slog that I have to force myself through. I fall into a state of depression because of the slow progress on my game, and my depression slows down the progress on my game. I’ll take any shortcuts I can at that stage, stopping just short of generative AI (which is the line that I refuse to cross). The only thing keeping me going is my total commitment to the game. Working on juice at that point feels like torture.

Then the game reaches the first fully playable version, and what was previously torture becomes a joy to me, because I now have a game, and I can make it better. Failure is no longer a possibility, it’s just a matter of fixing this one little thing before release, then this other little thing, and soon I’ve spent a whole year fixing little issues, and it was the most productive year since I started working on the game.

I remember reading about a study a long time ago about how things get popular. What they found out is that if you ask 20 or so randomly selected people to individually rate a set of songs without talking to each other, they will give remarkably consistent results. Individual people will have different tastes, but one randomly selected set of 20 people will have very similar tastes to another randomly selected set of 20 people because individual tastes average out. Each set will have about as many rock fans and pop fans and rap fans and classical fans and so on any other set. That doesn’t mean that the top picks were objectively any better than the other songs, but that they reflect the collective tastes of society.

However, if you select 20 people and let them talk to each other about the songs they’re rating, you’re going to get very inconsistent results, not just between different groups but within the same group on different days. The lowest rated songs were still unpopular, but songs that were mid-rated for the randomly selected people who can’t talk to each other could easily shoot to the top and vice versa. People influence each other’s tastes, even when they’re not trying, and this has a spiraling effect on popularity.

What this means is that winning a game contest is always at least as much a matter of luck as it is of creating the best entry. So don’t enter a game contest with the intention of winning, and don’t take it personally when you don’t win. Treat it less like a race and more like raffle.

Your game descriptions are very short and undescriptive, missing punctuation and capitalization, and the first one is very hard to read with dark text on dark background. In short, it looks like you put little effort into the game page, which can be indicative of a low-effort game. I have no idea if that’s the reason you’re not indexed, but I recommend fixing it either way.

The best “solution” is to just use the website instead of the app. Even with all of the flaws of the website, I still prefer it to the app. (To be fair, I haven’t used the app in years now, so maybe it has improved by now - but looking at the complaints people still post about the app, probably not.)

The radical solution would be to add pdf support to Playnite. Playnite can already play emulated games in an emulator, and a pdf viewer could be treated as an “emulator” to run pdf “games”. Looking at https://api.playnite.link/docs/manual/features/emulationSupport/addingNewEmulators.html, this shouldn’t be all that difficult to do with the technical skills.

See, the thing is that I don’t think “following” someone counts as an interaction. I’m interacting with Itch, not with you. Same as when I watch somebody on TV, or read a magazine article about someone. Itch made it into an interaction, by giving you access to your list of followers, and by giving followers some extra information that non-followers don’t get. Both of which are bad ideas, IMO.

Look at the things I can do without following. I can visit your profile page and see your recent posts. I can bookmark your profile page and look at it every day. I can see your creator page. If I really wanted to harass you, I would already have all of the information I need. I wouldn’t even need an account!

For that matter, think about how easy it would be to follow someone with one account while using another account to harass them, and how easy it is to lie on the internet. The way to be “safe” is to accept no followers.

I follow people because I want to hear about it when they create new works, because there’s a decent chance that I would enjoy those works or find them useful. That’s it. It’s the equivalent of bookmarking their creator page, but without having to check that page manually. I follow without posting a message first precisely because I don’t want to interact with them. (Not because I don’t like them, but because I am just not very social by nature.) I don’t even care if they block me, so long as this does not stop me from buying their stuff. But who I am following is not public information, and I don’t want it to be used against me.

Harassment is a serious problem, but making it slightly less convenient to access public information is not an effective way of dealing with it.

But I absolutely agree that blocking should be stronger.