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.

There's an error message "Image 'dustreverse' not found." in the upper left corner of the screen.  Running on Linux Mint.  It just shows up when I reach this scene, without any special action to trigger it.

Absolutely not.  If I wanted to actually talk to characters in a game, I'd find a LARP group where the characters I talk to are played by actual human beings.

The fps games that I actually enjoy are usually as much about exploring the environment as about shooting.

I've read a lot of books on game design, and there are only two of them that I'd recommend.  You're already reading one of them.  The other one is "Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation" by Steve Swink.

If I have several free spaces for e.g. furnaces and then try to build just one furnace, it automatically builds multiple furnaces at once.  Is that intentional?

As far as assets are concerned, if I use them in a commercial game and I have the option of paying, then I pay.  Because I can afford to, because artists deserve to be paid, and because I am not a deadbeat.  That doesn't mean I want to become an art critic.

I enjoyed Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion.

Not quite what you're looking for, but maybe close enough: https://taylormccue.itch.io/trauma

Maybe leave a review?

If I search for the "No AI" tag, click on any result, then click on "more information", I can see "No AI" among the list of tags.  So you can see if something is marked as "No AI".

However, the converse for the "AI Generated" tag is not true.  If I search for the "AI Generated" tag, click on any result, then click on "more information", I can't see "AI Generated" in the list of tags.

I don't know why it works this way, but if it's AI-safe, then it should have the "No AI" tag which is visible, and if it doesn't have a visible "No AI" tag, then it's not AI-safe.

Interestingly, I can get some search results by searching for both "No AI" and "AI Generated" at the same time.

Today I learned that 32 bit Windows 10 is a thing.  The only reason I still support 32 bit Windows is that I don't have a copy of 64 bit Windows XP for testing that my games still run on Windows XP.

Never heard of it.  What's Sprunki, and why should I care?

Counterpoint: I want to be able to support games I like by giving them a positive review, even if I purchased them on GOG instead of itch.

There is a clear legal difference between human brains and computers.  There has to be in order for copyright to work, because every time I consume a copyrighted work, I am creating a copy in my brain.  I can legally read a short poem and have a perfect copy of that in my brain.  If I later write down the poem that's now in my brain, that's when I'm breaking copyright - not before.

There is a legal technique called clean-room design to create a functional clone of something without breaking copyright law.  It involves two teams of engineers working together.  The first team examines the original and writes a specification.  The second team creates the clone according to the specification without looking at the original.  In order for this technique to work, the following all have to be true:

• It is legal for the first team to examine the original.
• Examining the original taints the first team.  Because they now carry around a copy of the original in their brain, any clone they create will now legally be a derivative work.
• The specification that the first team creates is not itself tainted.

Any argument that it should be legal to do something on a computer if it's legal to do the same thing in a human brain is either an argument against copyright itself or an argument in favor of government thought control.  I can sort of get behind the former, but our governments and courts have decided differently.  The latter is completely unconscionable.

AI feeds on hand-created art in the most literal sense.  Without hand-created art to train on, there would be no AI art.

The problem with most AI models is that they are obviously infringing on copyright by being trained on unlicensed copyrighted materials.  This is likely to bite the companies that produce these models, and those that use these models, in the ass in the near future.

I have no problem with AI algorithms so long as you train them exclusively on your own art.  I have a problem with copyright theft, where people take other people's art, remix it through an AI algorithm, and claim to own the copyright on the result.

Hi.  There's a pinned "introduce yourself" thread right on top of the page.  Please use that instead of starting new threads just to introduce yourself.