itch.io

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 interaction 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.

Let me turn this around. I don’t think Itch should tell you who is following you. Blocking a follower should be a complete non-issue because you shouldn’t know who your followers are in the first place.

I follow people because I want to be notified when they release or update projects. That’s it. I don’t do it to boost their egos or as an invitation to some kind of two-sided parasocial relationship. Telling the person I am following that I am following them feels like a violation of my privacy. And I am not violating their privacy because following them shouldn’t give me any information that isn’t already public.

(Technically following does give you access to information that only followers get in the form of game reviews, but that’s just another misfeature that I hate about Itch.)

Also:

I agree, if you block you have to block everything, it happened to me yesterday to block someone who after just one minute of registering on the site came to follow me, it seemed suspicious to me and I immediately blocked him,But I keep seeing it in the people who follow me, even if I’d like to delete it I can’t.

Sorry, what’s suspicious about that situation? Person comes to Itch and hangs out for some time. After browsing for some time, person wants to follow someone. Person realizes that they need an account to follow someone, so they create an account and hit the follow button immediately afterwards. If you think that’s suspicious, then maybe Itch should allow you to opt out of being followed at all.

I’m disappointed at how little material about the fey is actually in the book. You could strip out all of it and still have a perfectly playable RPG 90% of the size of the original.

Under Quickling, your pronunciation says Tylwyth Teg (which is Welsh for Fair Folk, a generic term for all fey), but your text says Tylwyth Flicker (which, if you actually said it to a Welsh person, would probably be understood as Tylwyth Flickr, “Flickr Folk”, i.e. people who use the Flickr website).

I think some degree of adaptability in character AI is useful, but everything depends on context.

Example. You’re fighting an enemy wizard. The wizard has two protection spells, one against ice (which makes him vulnerable to fire) and one against fire (which makes him vulnerable to ice), but he can only use one at a time. But your party is completely specialized for ice magic. So you attack when the fire protection spell is up, and heal when the ice protection spell is up. What possible motivation does the wizard have for ever using the fire protection spell?

In terms of game balance, the answer is obvious: to give your ice-based party a fighting chance. But in terms of character motivation, it stinks. It’s obvious that the wizard isn’t a thinking person trying to defeat you, but a randomized list of actions that he follows like the automation he is. And the game is fully justified in punishing you for overspecializing. What’s your party going to do against a ice-immune opponent who doesn’t have a convenient ice vulnerability that he turns on every few turns in order to be sporting?

But the thing is, fixing this doesn’t require any complex AI code. It’s basically just three line in a script somewhere:

  if damage_taken_with_current_protection > damage_taken_with_other_protection:
    switch_protection()
    swap(damage_taken_with_current_protection, damage_taken_with_other_protection)

That’s the kind of adaptive AI that I find interesting.

While you can use modern machine learning techniques to create an AI that is really good at defeating the player with machine-like precision, this is usually not the best way to approach AI problems. Unless you’re creating a chess game or similar, your goal isn’t to defeat the player. Your goal is to allow the player to suspend their disbelief and pretend that they’re interacting with a human. Excessively stupid behavior breaks this illusion, but so does excessively smart behavior. People have biases. People have emotions that cloud their judgement. People make rash decisions that they regret later. People can’t focus of the bigger strategic picture and the enemy in front of them at the same time if the enemy is charging at them with a sword.

An AI-controlled npc should have a set of numbers controlling their personality. This npc is a fool who charges straight at a bigger opponent, that npc is a coward who runs from a smaller opponent. If these numbers change during gameplay, that’s learning. It doesn’t have to make the npc smarter. In fact, it can do the opposite. Let’s say that you trick the wizard in the original scenario into stepping into an active campfire. And it hurts. A lot. So now the wizard has developed a phobia of fire. He’ll keep using fire protection spell, even if he knows that it makes no sense tactically, because he learned to be irrationally afraid of fire.

AI does not make a game slop. It’s the human that releases a slop game. And there are plenty of human made slop games too. It’s just that the slop game creators can make a lot of these with ai in a short time. Itch is self publishing which means that there is no publisher that would block low effort slop. In theory the quality guidelines would deny indexing for slop. But distinguishing an amateur game from professional slop ain’t easy.

You are going to to lose that culture war. In ten years, using “slop” as anything other than a derogatory term for AI output is going to be like using “gay” in its previous sense of “happy” instead of “homosexual”. Oh, the word will still be applied to human works, but the subtext is going to be “you are less than human for creating something this bad”.

Generated is a subset of contributed.

Actually…

If I say that I contributed to an anthology, I don’t mean I was the inspiration for it or any subset of it. But I also don’t mean that some stock art I created was used by one of the works in the anthology, or even that a whole work of mine was included in the anthology without my input. I mean that I created a work and intentionally submitted it to the anthology for inclusion, and that it was accepted.

Same thing for other works. I contributed to a piece of open source software if my name is on one of the commits or an accepted pull request. I contributed to a potluck if I actually brought food. I contributed to a fund if I put my own money into the fund, not if some of the money in the fund was in my hands at some distant point in the future.

So, I agree that contributed was a poor choice of word. Not because it is too broad, but because it is far too narrow.

You seem to make a distinction by agency or some other arbitrary criteria.

Inspiration is not copyrightable. Inspiration is not controllable. And, yes, inspiration is not intentional. But most importantly, inspiration happens entirely on the side of the inspired. If I look at AI slop and say “this is crap, I can do better”, I am “inspired” by that AI slop to do better. You can say that there is a causal relationship between me seeing the slop and me making the work. You can even use the word “contribute” if you want and say that seeing the slop was a contributing factor to the fact that I am making the work. But neither the slop itself nor the AI that generated it has contributed to the work itself.

Do you see the difference between “the fact that I am making the work” and the work itself? Do you see that the word “contribute” works slightly differently when I am talking “contributing factor” than when I talk about a “contribution to a work”? Do you understand basic English?

The idea of the character is obviously ai generated. But does it fit the question for content produced by? If you copy things word by word, it would fit the text category. If you only use general behaviour and create your own interpretation of that character, no. But it would fit a contributed/inspired by classification.

Do you claim ownership of the character? Would you sue someone else for using the same character? Could you?

Big media concerns certainly treat their characters as entities worthy of legal protection independently of the works they appear in. You can write a story about a rich guy who dresses up as a bat and beats up criminals instead of using his money to address the sources of crime, but you can’t write a story about Batman. At least not if you want to sell it. There’s an important legal distinction here.

So, did you use a character generated by an AI, or did you use a bunch of general traits, generated by an AI, to create your own character? You can always claim it was the latter, and nobody would know the difference in practice. And unless you’re an AI bro who thinks that claiming that the character was AI generated makes them look cool to other AI bros, you probably should. So it’s a non-issue in practice.

If you learn coding by asking ai and pester it about your coding problems, the game you create would be ai assisted. But it only contains ai code, if you actually put generated code into it. That’s what I read from here https://itch.io/post/11423405

Yes, “assisted” isn’t the best word here, but it’s one that Itch uses, so we’re kind of stuck with it. And in the context of AI disclosure on Itch, assisted and generated mean the same thing. That’s the context I’ve been using. Words means different things in different contexts. You can make one distinction, I can make another one, and neither distinction makes a bit of a difference if Itch uses one wording to communicate with developers and another wording when communicating with players.

The “assistant” is the guy who fetches coffee for the director, but nobody is talking about robot butlers here.

One distinction one can make, however, is in which capacity the assistant is assisting and if it contributes (there’s that word again) to the work. The robot butler, and the AI search engine, are a totally different type of assistant than the assistant animator who draws the in-between frames. Itch is talking about the latter: AI assistants who actually generate work of their own that makes it into the final product instead of fetching coffee and looking up documentation.

If YouTube tutorials bore you, then you either have a very short attention span or you just don’t learn well from video tutorials. In the former case, Godot may not be for you. In the latter case, seek out written materials. The Godot documentation on the Godot web page is a good starting point, and several books on Godot have been published (but avoid books for Godot 3 or earlier).

Personally I’m one of those people who prefer to learn from written materials, although I have also learned from a lot of Godot video courses. Videos are just so much more common than written material.

You are making a distinction that does not exist, between “generated” and “contributed”. Creating art is a multi-stage process. These stages are generative in nature. If an AI does one of these stages, the result is (partially) AI-generated. That’s the meaning of “even if you hand-edited it”.

Use an AI to create the sketch, hand-edit it? AI generated. Draw the sketch yourself, have the AI turn it into a full painting? AI generated. AI created a 3D model of a brick, I used it to build a 3D house? AI generated. AI came up with the character design, I redrew it from scratch, but it’s clearly the same character, in a “if the sketch came from a human, I could be accused of plagiarizing their design” sense? Also AI generated. AI drew the background, I drew the characters? AI generated. AI drew the characters, I drew the background? The final artwork is a composite of several smaller works, and it counts as AI generated if any of these smaller works are the output of generative AI. That’s what I mean by “contributed”, not any vague “the robo taxi took me to the art supply store, therefore it contributed” sense.

Inspiration obviously does not count. The distinction is also quite clear. If the inspiration came from a human, would i need to credit them? Could they sue me? Would my work count as a derivative work? Only if I go beyond mere inspiration to outright copyright violation and/or plagiarism. Inspiration is not contribution.

You have an asset pack, with the NoAI tag, marked as AI assisted - sound.

Wow.

I kind of wanted to find out if something that has the NoAI tag but is also marked as AI assisted would show when browsing for the NoAI tag, because the NoAI tag is supposed to filter out everything AI assisted but also show things with the NoAI tag. But I couldn’t find your asset pack with or without the tag, presumably because it’s unindexed. I guess that answers my question: projects with the NoAI tag that are also marked as AI assisted are never indexed, so the contradiction never comes up.

Is a game ai made, because the assets are ai made? No, of course not.

Are you making some sort of weird distinction between “ai made” and “ai assisted”? Because that’s quite literally what AI disclosure is about. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the graphics, then the graphics (and by extension the game) are AI-assisted. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the sounds, then the sounds (and by extension the game) are AI-assisted. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the text, then the text (and by extension the game) is AI-assisted. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, any other asset, then that asset (and by extension the game) is AI-assisted. And distinct from that, if the AI made, or contributed to, any code in the game, then the code (and by extension the game) is AI-assisted.

And in the end it’s all “assisted”. A human told the AI to make the game. Even if the entire game was made by an AI from a prompt as generic as “make a game”, the prompt still contributes. No prompt, no game. Even if the AI is programmed to not need a prompt, there’s still the programmer.

Or are you going for some sort of distinction between third-party “assets” and first-party “non-asset graphics/sound/text”? I cannot interpret your statement, because every interpretation I can come up with is absurd. But that has been the pattern of this thread for a long time, so perhaps one of the absurd interpretations is the correct one.

But your level would not be a level in the level kind of sense. It would be visuals.

It’s being used in an outdoor RTS game with a real-world setting. There are impassable mountains, hills that offer the advantage of high ground, river crossings and narrow mountain passes to defend. It’s a playable level, not just something to look at. The unit placement is not part of that level. Initial bases are randomly placed at the start of the game; everything else is up to the players to build.

Or, another example: the player cannot see any of the level. There are no visuals whatsoever, just audio and force feedback. The game is an educational game about the challenges blind people face navigating the world. You can call the game a walking simulator if you like, but you cannot call the level (or any other part of the game) graphics.

Well, the first step is to finish your game. People want finished, polished games. Or unfinished games that look good enough and are fun enough that they could be finished.

Unfortunately I don’t know the second step, because I have polished finished games with years of development behind them on Itch, and they’re still not very popular.

But the third step is profit!

Is there some place sales events are announced before they go live? Because I’ve been coming here nearly daily for a long time, and I had no advance notification that the Summer Sale was going to happen. (I probably should have guessed that it would happen, because it happens every year, but I had no idea when it would run.) I didn’t see it on the main page, I didn’t see it in the community forum, and it doesn’t show up on the blog (which I never check anyway due to low activity) until the event starts. I also didn’t get any email (unless it was marked as spam). I do see it on my dashboard, but I don’t know how long it was there and I’m not in the habit of randomly checking my dashboard when I have nothing new to release.

Meanwhile, Steam announces sales events for the whole year by email, so I can set up my sales all at once.

Where do other developers find out? Do they just check their dashboard all the time? Is that what I should be doing?

There is a bucket full of machine made bricks. The kid toy kind. A kid builds a playhouse with those toy bricks. Is the house human made or machine made ;-)

That’s structurally no different than a game made with AI graphics assets. Machine-made doesn’t have the same stigma as AI-made and the kid isn’t trying to sell copies of the house while competing with fully hand-made houses, so nobody is going to call the kid out on it. Using machine-made parts is OK. Heck, I use a compiler (a machine) to compile my own code all the time!

When I download real world elevation data, it is just that. Data. When I then include it in a game, it is still just data. Even if this data makes up my entire level design. The choice to use that data is design. The code that turns the elevation data into a polygon mesh that can be displayed and interacted with is code. But the data itself is just data. And that is still true if I used AI-generated elevation data instead of real world elevation data.

And my Sokoban level is the same “kind of thing” as elevation data. If you only look at the walls, it literally is elevation data: high where the walls are, low where they aren’t.

Maps are data. When they are made as images to display, they are graphics data. When they are made of tiles and spawn points, they are non-graphics data. (And when they consist of height data, they can be either graphics data or non-graphics data, depending on how the data is used. Normal maps, created from height maps and used purely for display, are graphics.) My simple Sokoban level aside, they are made in specialized map editors, not text editors. They are not Turing complete. They do not contain more than the simplest “logic”. They are not made by programmers, but by level designers.

Even if you want to call them code, because that’s the hill you chose to die on, nobody else will do the same. They’re the kind of things that beginner developers create in so-called no-code game engines because they are too intimidated to learn an actual programming language.

(If you want to say that no-code game engines are an oxymoron, I say that it depends on how limited the game engine in question is. Visual scripting is still scripting and therefore coding. But map editing is not.)

And another thing: just because something is encoded in code, doesn’t mean that thing is code. Example script:

  npc.speak("Thank you for helping out.  Here's your reward.");
  npc.give_player_gold(10);

Taken as a whole, it’s definitely code. But the thing between the quotes, that’s text. Putting it in the script is a task for a programmer, but actually writing it? That’s the writer’s job. And the number 10 is just a number, i.e. data. Even if it is embedded in a script. And while a number by itself may not be copyrightable, a database consisting of labeled numbers certainly can. It’s just a matter of scale.

If I carefully design a reward schedule for quests in my game, that’s copyrightable non-code work. If I ask an AI to do the same, that’s non-code AI work (but non-copyrightable because of AI). And if I include this schedule in the game, whether it is as a standalone file or a bunch of numbers scattered across dozens of scripts, I am including non-code non-graphics non-audio non-text AI content in my game.

So. What is a level? Because it sure ain’t “plain” data as you seem to claim.

It’s an idea. Two implementation of Sokoban can have the same level despite not sharing and code or any data.

What the. What? You make no sense at all here.

Interpreting is not displaying it to a user or downloading. Interpreting is a synonym for executing code that is human readable. Usually seen in scripting languages. But a video game does just the same. It interprets your “plain data” as a puzzle level. Which makes that data anything but plain.

Wait, you mean “interpreting” in the “interpreted (computer) language” sense, and not in any more general layperson sense? Really?

A unicode text file is a series of intructions that tell you which character to render where on the screen. A potentially fairly complicated set of instructions, when you consider RTL languages, combining characters, context-dependent character form, and so on.

The Sokoban level I posted uses a very, very primitive subset of that language. Every character in the example represents exactly that character on the screen. The game runs in text mode, so the characters are stored directly in video memory. There is no data representation of the game state beyond what’s in video memory.

Maybe it helps if we consider not a puzzle level, but maybe a quest module in a game like Skyrim. Such a thing is basically a script.

I consider the actual scripting part of a Skyrim quest module to be code. Not the images. Not the text. Not the sound. And especially not map or the stats of the enemies or the general idea of the quest, although all of these things can be encoded in the script.

When someone says that they used assistance for coding I assume that they mean that they came with the game design and used assistance for turning it into code. When someone uses assistance for the game design or any of its subsets (level design, puzzle design, world design, narrative design, whatever) but writes the code themselves, I don’t expect them to say that they used assistance for coding. I do expect them to say that they used AI assistance in general.

Here is an interesting thought experiment for you. Imagine an animated movie where the director is an AI. The artists are all human, so the graphics are not AI-assisted. The script is written by a human, so the text is not AI-assisted. The sounds are all produced by humans, no AI there.

The humans don’t even need to be aware of the AI director, if that awareness taints their work in your opinion. The AI director can come along later and cut the movie together from previously created assets. The AI director makes the ultimate decision about what goes where, but creates nothing.

So, how would you handle AI disclosure for the movie? The AI director does all of the things that you ascribe to “code” in a game, but there is literally no code in a movie. Unless you count the codec used to encode the movie as a computer file.

Writing a programming language based on Turkish instead of English is a bold choice!

A localized programming language, on the other hand, just sounds terrible. Microsoft Excel has one, and it’s one of those things that people love to hate about Excel. Given the choice, I’d rather program in Turkish. But that’s just my opinion.

Problem: the game doesn’t fit on its own canvas:

(Running Firefox on Linux Mint, 2160p resolution, no scaling.)

It sure looks like that from the English-speaking parts of the internet.

In truth, several other languages (like Chinese and Russian) have what is practically their own internet. Westerners don’t hear much about those parts of the internet because they don’t speak the native language and because they are not welcome there, but I assure you that they exist.

There does appear to be something weird going on with that game that you’re no longer linking. It’s definitely marked NSFW (i.e. I can’t find it all all without turning on NSFW content), and it definitely charges money. And yet, clicking on the uberpie tag in the game’s list of tags shows the game, so the game can be found through tags, which should never happen for unindexed games. I am intrigued.

(That the game shows up on the Top Sellers list is no proof either way because that page could intentionally or unintentionally ignore the indexed status of the game.)

One hypothesis is that the game collects payment directly without going through Itch, and that this makes them exempt from the “no money for nsfw” rule, but that’s just one possibility. Another is that it’s a bug on the part of Itch, or an exploit on the part of the game. Or that there are circumstances where browsing by tags will show unindexed games after all.

There are three types of NSFW games on Itch:

• Those that accept no payment. Free NSFW games can be indexed.
• Those that are not indexed. (The game you linked to appears to be one of those, although I’m not sure how you found it if that’s the case.)
• Those that are mislabeled as SFW, and will be marked as NSFW if they are ever found out. (If the game you linked to is one of those, please report it by going to the game page and pressing the Report link.)

Literal porn game or NSFW for some other reason makes no difference. Either the game is NSFW (meaning it either accepts no payment or is unindexed) or it’s not.

1.Itch.io BAN chinese IP, not China ban Itch.io

From the perspective of game developers here, it doesn’t matter who is blocking who. All that matters is if Chinese people can see the games. Why would you anybody put Chinese-language games on a site that blocks Chinese gamers?

That said, I seriously doubt that Itch bans Chinese IPs, but I doubt even more that China doesn’t ban Itch. Because Itch is full of things that the Chinese government finds offensive. Heck, it’s full of things I find offensive. There may even be some overlap! If China doesn’t ban Itch, that’s probably a matter of oversight, not of policy.

(For the record: I would love to add Chinese translations to my games, but my Chinese isn’t nearly good enough to make the translation myself, and I can’t really afford to hire a good translator, plus an independent editor to verify the translation, at the moment.)

A level for a game is a set of instructions. Not unlike a punch card for a mechnical piano.

So you’re arguing that audio is a subset of code. Also, factually wrong. A level can be encoded as a set of instructions, but that’s not what a level is.

It was an idea, a puzzle, the game level’s logic. And what do we call the thing that makes the game tick? Code.

Personally I call an idea an idea, a puzzle a puzzle, logic logic, and code code.

You seem to understand that data and code is the same.

So you’re arguing that graphics, audio, and text are code.

And if you interpret data, it is not on the far end of non-code data, it is on the code site.

If it’s on a computer file, you cannot access the data at all without interpreting it. You can’t even download it.

That’s a formal fallacy.

If the least X-like out all of possible Ys is classified as X, then logically all Ys must be classified as X. That’s not overgeneralization, that’s literally how generalization works.

which makes the distinction of code and not-code meaningless in a game.

That’s not game specific. You cannot tell if something is code, just by having it compiled into an exe. And you cannot tell if something is data, just because you could read it with a text editor and is a file.

We’re past the point of comparing code with data, and have reached the point of comparing code with non-code in general. I am code. You are code. The color green is code. The act of eating is code. We might as well throw the words away, because it no longer serves its purpose of distinguishing between things that belong in its category and things that don’t.

You seem to consider “data” as a 5th category, if said data does not fit visual, sounds or text. If that data fits the definition of an instruction set, I consider it code. And in case of a puzzle level, there is not even ambiguity.

You seem to think that there is a meaningful definition of “code” that includes all computer files, and all data in general, except graphics, sound, and text. Try it. Post such a definition. I don’t even care if your definition includes the color green, all I care is that graphics and sound and text are excluded and all other data files in a game are included.

The only restriction is that you can’t explicitly mention the categories of graphics, sound, or text in your definition. Because if you do, you have a wastebasket taxon that is better called “other”, not “code”.

In case of a sokoban level generated with generative ai, it is code. It is literally a set of instructions.

There is a stronger argument for png files being code and you know it, so stop pretending otherwise.

For the less technically inclined, this is what a Sokoban level looks like:

#####
#@$.#
#####

Note how it’s literally just plain data. There are graphical Sokoban implementations that replace these text characters with graphics, but there are also text-based Sokoban implementation which use exactly these characters to represent the game. On a spectrum from code and data, this at the absolute far end of non-code data. If this plain data is code, then logically all plain data must be code, which makes the distinction of code and not-code meaningless in a game.

A png file, on the other hand, uses data compression. A compressed data file basically consists of a set of instructions for reconstructing the uncompressed data. On a spectrum from code to data, this is still comfortably on the data end of the spectrum, but not quite at the extreme end.

There are two possible interpretations of “other”: generative AI output that does not fit in the categories (graphics, audio, text, code), and non-generative AI use. They are different. They must be treated differently.

Puzzle design and level design are not in any of the given categories unless you stretch the categories to the point of meaninglessness. Ask an AI to generate a Sokoban level for you. If you call the result graphics, you’ve stretched the definition of graphics to also include text. (After all, it’s all pixels on the screen.) If you call the result code, you’ve stretched the definition of code to include graphics, audio, and text. (After all, it’s all encoded information that the computer uses to produce some sort of output.) If you call the result text, then the entire game is text (which is how literary theory uses the term “text”). If you call it audio, then you’re just being an obnoxious and have abandoned all definitions.

Non-generative use of AI is something entirely different. It’s finding (not fixing) bugs with AI. It’s using an AI-powered search engine to look up information. It’s letting AI gamble on the stock market to fund your game. And yes, it’s letting using an AI to test your game.

Using non-generative AI is practically unavoidable and has little to do with the actual content of the game. It’s way to broad of a category to require disclosure. Disclosing specific, clearly defined subsets of this broad category may be useful, but Itch defines no such subsets, and they would have to be disclosed separately from generative AI.

Generative AI output that does not fit into the four categories, on the other hand, is common and should definitely be disclosed.

Games can contain AI-generated content that doesn’t fit into these categories, like puzzle design for example. (Not saying that’s the case here necessarily, just saying that it could/should be (and possibly is?) an option for AI disclosure.)

Um. The title of your game implies monotheism, but it’s a supplement for a game that assumes polytheism. I’m confused.

To clarify: I have no problems with people running monotheistic religions in a polytheistic setting. I also have no problem with people running monotheistic DnD campaigns. Do whatever makes you happy. But I do have a strong personal aversion to monotheism, especially to religions that use the g word as a form of address for their deity. And that aversion is strong enough for me to avoid your supplement, based on nothing but its title. So if the supplement is not primarily monotheistic, then I wish you would change the name - and if it is primarily monotheistic, I wish you would make this explicit in the description.

(I don’t care if you call your cat “Cat” or your dog “Dog”, but if you call your god “God”, I feel that you’ve crossed a line, even if you don’t deny the existence of other gods. And yes, I am aware of the etymology of Zeus and Tyr.)

The game status is still set to In Development.

Your link takes me to a 404 page. Either your project was blocked/deleted or you forgot to set your project page to public.

Not quite. libreadline.so.7 requires libtinfo.so.5, which I also don’t have.

What about a game that continues to act on that satisfaction.

That’s kind of expected from a satisfying game, unless the game ends right away? The alternative is to either stop satisfying and become addictive or stop satisfying and become so bad that it’s not even addictive anymore.

Even better would be user tags on games in your library, with the option to filter out by tag. That way I could differentiate between games I don’t want to play by reason for not wanting to play them: because I just don’t like them, because they don’t work on my computer, or because I already finished them. Depending on circumstances, I might want to look at the games in one of these categories while still filtering out the others.

What makes an RPG addictive? The same thing that makes anything addictive: the repeatedly broken promise of satisfaction. If it actually satisfies, then it’s not addictive.

A satisfying game makes you happy, and you stay happy when your session is over and you walk away from it. Sometimes you can even stop playing early because you already got what you wanted from the game.

An addictive game makes you miserable, but you constantly feel like it could make you feel better if you play just a little longer. You don’t want to walk away because whatever psychological need drove you to play the game is still unmet, but it will remain unmet as long as you play the game.

You can put audio books on Itch right now, in the Book category with an appropriate tag or in the Everything Else category. There don’t seem to be any audio books on Itch right now, so you could be the first!

The time to add a new category is after there are a good number of audio books on Itch, not before.

The first things I noticed:

• I can walk through the buildings.
• There is z-fighting between the roads going one way and the roads going the other way.
• No strafing. Out of the standard wasd keys for moving w and s work, but a and d do nothing.

Stopped playing after maybe a minute. As far as walkaround demos go, this is not a particularly interesting one.

The following missing files are needed:

• libsndio.so.6.1
• libtiff.so.5
• libwebp.so.6
• libfluidsynth.so.1
• libFLAC.so.8 (not in AdditionalFilesForLinuxAntix.zip)

Additionally, using ldd reveals that libfluidsynth.so.1 depends on libreadline.so.7, which is also not installed. (I do have a libreadline on my system, of course, but it’s up to version 8.)

Interestingly it appears that libSDL2_mixer-2.0.so.0 links to two different versions of libFLAC: libFLAC.so.12 (which I have installed) and libFLAC.so.8 (which I don’t).

There are basically three reasons for non-Chinese people not prioritizing Chinese localization:

1. On the technical level, the Chinese writing system is difficult to deal with because of the sheer number of different characters. It’s easy to find or make a small pixel font that supports the Latin alphabet, and not much harder to support Cyrillic, but Chinese fonts require huge numbers of characters, and the characters need to be relatively big to stay readable.
2. On the legal level, it’s easy for an outsider to accidentally violate Chinese censorship laws, which can result in the game being blocked in China.
3. On the economic level, the Chinese market is notoriously difficult to break into for outsiders. There are some major exceptions to this, but that’s all they are, exceptions. This affects even free indie games: why bother translating into Chinese if very few Chinese people are interested in the game?

The Linux version doesn’t work for me. I am using Linux Mint 22.3, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. I get this error message:

./Jim: error while loading shared libraries: libsndio.so.6.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I recommend either shipping libsndio.so.6.1 with your game or using SDL3, which dynamically loads its dependencies and can therefore still run if some of its dependencies are missing.

Some types of stories absolutely have a minimum (and maximum) length. For example, the Odyssey is the story of one man’s very long and eventful trip home. The emotional payoff of him actually getting home only works as a payoff because of how long it took to get there. The length is the whole point of the story. You can condense the plot to a haiku by summarizing, but it’ll lose all of its emotional impact. So, your concern is a valid one.

That said, it very much depends on the specifics of your work. You don’t need general platitudes about how it’s OK to write a short visual novel, you need specific feedback about if your visual novel works at its current length. Read it yourself while pretending someone else had written it. Get your friends and family to read it. Post your visual novel in Get Feedback. Take it to a local or online writing circle. The only opinions that matter are those of people who have actually read it.

I can very much understand not wanting to let people see your unfinished works, but you either need to push aside that feeling and find someone you can trust with your unfinished work, or you need to completely rely on your own judgement. There is no third way.

Really good core mechanics, but after two rounds it just locks up.

You did report these games, right? And by that I mean you actually clicked on the Report link at the bottom of the page, which is not the same as email to support. Reporting is the correct way of dealing with miscategorized games, and there’s even a Miscategorized radio button just for reporting miscategorized games. If you’ve done it correctly, you will not receive any response at all, not even an automated “[Request received]” message.

Posts here will not even be read by the people in charge. Support emails used for reporting miscategorized games will likely be ignored. Using the Report feature, which exists just for this purpose, may actually work (eventually).