itch.io

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.

Vector art is probably the easiest choice.

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.

If I had been in California before the gold rush, I would be rich! If I had sailed around the Earth before Magellan, I would be famous! If I had written Mickey Mouse porn before Steamboat Willy was released, I could sue Disney for stealing my characters instead of the other way around! If I had lived in the middle ages, I wouldn’t have to look at AI slop!

It’s a common enough thought, but it’s not a particularly interesting or productive one, so most people don’t dwell on it.

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.

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?