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The paintings in the Louvre are there for historical reasons and because people that claim to know art, have already selected them for being famous.

Every art museum I’ve ever visited, and I’ve visited quite a few, could stand to lose 90% to 99% of its content. In my entirely subjective opinion. I’m convinced that the only reason anybody cares about the Mona Lisa is because it’s famous for being famous, and that’s not even getting into the modern “look how avant-garde I am for rejecting all artistic principles” crap.

I know that’s just my subjective opinion, but that’s all artistic judgement ultimately is: somebody’s subjective opinion.

Go to them and explain them, that it is not art what they do.

Did I say that? I said I find their artistic and copyright claims kind of ridiculous, because they are. Maybe you are not familiar with those claims?

Real example. A couple gets married. Hires a photographer. Pays the photographer. Gets the pictures as physical prints. Photographer keeps the negatives and the copyright. The couple needs to pay the photographer again if they want one of the pictures printed larger. Meanwhile, the photographer can publish the the photos on his website or submit them to a contest or do whatever he wants with the pictures.

Is this legal? Well, yeah, because that’s the contract all parties signed. But that’s a pretty brazen thing to even put in a contract. Yeah, the couple wants them to look good (that’s why they hired a professional photographer), but they’re not looking for higher artistic merit. Wedding photos are the physical representation of memories, and now somebody else owns those memories.

Meanwhile all the other artistic input that went into the photos never even makes it to the negotiating table. The bride looks beautiful in her wedding dress, but the dress designer gets no credit. The photographer doesn’t even know her name.

Another example. Photography exhibition. Lots of pictures of models posing. Every picture has the name of the photographer who took it. None of them even mention the models. Did the photographer tell the model how to pose? Maybe, or maybe the model told the photographer what pictures to take. We’ll never know.

A photograph can be real art, but the photographer is only one person out of many who make a photo happen. Claiming otherwise is arrogance, like Disney pretending they own fairy tales that existed for hundreds of years before Disney, or AI “artists” claiming to be, well, artists.

And I do think we need to let go of the plagiarism argument.

That’s like saying we need to let go of the child abuse argument when talking about child porn. That (and energy usage, I suppose) is literally the only argument that matters.

Is AI slop soulless? Yes. Do I block people that post it just so I don’t have to look at it? Also yes. But is it worse than the randomly generated maps in a typical roguelike? Not really. It’s actually what the every roguelike map generator aspires to create: randomly generated output that looks artistic at first glance. Too bad you can’t get there without plagiarism.

I may not like roguelikes, but I don’t have a problem with them existing.

Yeah, it requires skill and a lot of guts. But it will not require artistic judgement.

Picking the best best paintings requires artistic judgement. Just like picking the best photo from a set. The best angle for the photo. The best stock art from the website. The best slop from the plagiarism machine.

You are on the right track here. It is not the same skill, not the same art. A photographer does not get credit for how the statue looks with the naked eye. A photographer gets credit for how the photo looks. It’s a different art form. And it’s more than picking the angle.

Surely you can see how the way the photo looks depends on how the statue looks? The sculptor spent months working on the sculpture. The photographer spent maybe an hour. I am in no way denying what the photographer contributed to the end result, but it’s a fairly small contribution in big scheme of things.

Same with the movie director, by the way. Does his contribution matter? Yes, obviously. A bad director can ruin any movie. But does he deserve the top billing he usually gets? Not really. I would say that the scriptwriter (or the creator of the original work in movie adaptions) is far more important. I liked the Lord of the Rings movies, not because I think that Peter Jackson did a great job, but because they were a halfway competent adaption of a brilliant book series. Just about any time the movies deviated from the books, the movies suffered for it.

Given that at least 99% of the games on itch, including but not limited to all of the free ones, produce no revenue, I am pretty sure itch employees are all overworked and underpaid.  I'm willing to give them a fair amount of slack, even while I acknowledge that they are running a shitshow.

Just because I block users who post AI slop instead of engaging with them doesn't make me an AI advocate.  (I'm willing to engage with AI advocates like redonihunter so long as they don't cross the line and start posting slop themselves.)

I am well aware of likeness rights, and the limitations thereof.

Picking and stealing the best paintings from the Louvre requires real skill and artistic judgement (because I said best, not most popular).  It's still stealing, and it doesn't make you an artist.

Photography is kind of in between.  If you take a photo of a statue, you're basically saying "this statue looks interesting from this angle in this lighting with these camera setting".  Well, it doesn't look that way by accident.  It looks that way because somebody intentionally made it look that way.  You get credit for picking the angle, but you don't get credit for the way the statue looks.  Do the same thing with a sunset, and there's nobody else around to claim credit, so you get all of the credit by default.

I always found the artistic and copyright claims of photographers kind of ridiculous.  Yes, photography requires real skill and artistic judgement, but it's still a mechanical reproduction of the subject.  Photograph a man-made object, and the creator of that object deserves more credit for the photo than the photographer.  Photograph a person or even an animal, and that person or animal deserves more credit than the photographer.  Photographers are allowed to be proud of their contribution, but it's ridiculous that they can claim sole authorship and sole copyright.

The current situation is that Serbian is treated as a single language.

My argument for treating it as two languages, other than consistency with Chinese, is that people who are fluent in one writing system may not be fluid in, or even familiar with, another writing system.  For example, if I write a game in English using Braille as the writing system, most English speakers would not be able to read it.  I don't know enough about Serbian or Interslavic to tell how much of an issue this would be for users of those languages.  Of course this only matter if it's possible to filter by language.

(Note: Chinese (simplified) and Chinese (traditional) literally are exactly the same language, differing only by writing system.  It has nothing to do with dialect.  All Chinese dialects that can be written with simplified characters can also be written with traditional characters and vice versa.)

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.