itch.io

Final Fantasy 6 is a beautiful 2D game.  It does not need a remake; it is pretty much perfect the way it is (although removing the mode 7 sections would be an improvement).  Remaking it in 3D would be blasphemy.

Final Fantasy 7 is one of the ugliest games I have ever seen, and not just because of the hardware limitations.  It stands out as particularly ugly even among the general ugliness of the original Playstation games.  If ever a games needed to be remade, this is it.  It already received a few remakes, but the more the merrier.

What you have to do is pay for your copy of RPG Maker, because the people who created it deserve to be paid.  Taking down your game isn't going to make this right.  The people who created RPG Maker can't buy food for their families with you taking down their game.  They need money.

There are a lot of possible tags that could be used to describe games, but there is also a limit of 10 tags per game.  Therefore any game that fits the description of more than 10 tags will be missing some of the tags it could use.

The description says 10 characters, but I only see 7 in the zip file.

Most newbie game developers are horrible at creating art for their game.  They can either try to work on their skills until they can draw something that doesn't look horrible, or they can lean into it and create a horror game.  The latter requires much less effort, so unsurprisingly that's what a lot of people do. 

It is possible to create horror art that actually looks good while still looking scary, but you wouldn't know it from browsing itch.

AppImage is useful for packaging, but it doesn't prevent broken builds by itself.  I've seen plenty of Linux games without AppImage that work fine, and I think I've seen at least some AppImage games that don't work (although AppImage is pretty rare).  I do use AppImage for my own games, but more importantly, I use static linking where I can and I redistribute .so files and use custom rpaths where I am forced to use dynamic linking.

I use Linux almost exclusively.  I want to see more Linux games.  But my experience with Linux games, on itch and on GOG, is that more often than not they just don't work.  Building and packaging a Linux game so that it works across different versions of different distributions is apparently beyond the abilities of a lot of developers.  As such, I prefer it if Linux games come with a Windows version so that I can fall back to running the games under Wine if I can't get the Linux version to run.

Shadows are present but small (as if the sun is directly above, no shadows from the crowns of the trees) and weak (not very dark, no hue shift).  The color scheme is strong in the reds and greens, with very little blue.  I can't really tell what time of day or weather is being depicted.  Dusk would have longer, darker shadows.  Overcast day would have less color, and probably even weaker shadows.  Night would have a lot less color and much darker shadows.  Direct sunlight at noon would have darker shadows with a definite hue shift.  So now I'm thinking either noon with dust clouds/smog dimming and reddening the light, or a deliberately ambiguous twilight meant to unsettle the player with its ambiguity.

My initial impression was that this looks too bright and cheery for a dark fantasy setting, but now I'm thinking this could work, in a daylight/twilight horror sort of way.  The comedy aspects of the game shouldn't affect the mood of the art style because comedy is funniest when it contrasts against the dominant mood.

Kind of hard to tell the dark orange from the light orange on level 1.

The linework on the portrait looks sloppy, like downscaled high-res art instead of true pixel art.  You've got uneven curves, you've got broken lines, and you've got stray pixels.  The design is fine, but some clean-up would really help.

The sprite looks fine, although some more shading would help it pop more.

I don't mind having to switch to full-screen, but I prefer a single keypress ('f' and 'alt-enter' are both commonly used) to having to navigate a menu.

I run almost all of my programs either full-screen or maximized.  Games, web browsers, file browser, command prompt, even my music player.  I can only focus my attention on one program at a time anyway, so why waste screen space for something I am not using right that second?

The length of a book is usually expressed in words, not pages.  Although that's obviously biased against illustration-heavy books...

The chances of writing a commercially successful game in one month, even if you have all the skills required, are about the same as the chances of winning the lottery.  It often happens to somebody - every lottery has its winners - but it probably won't happen to you.

Looking at your previous games, you probably don't have the skills yet, so your chances are probably closer to the chances of winning the lottery without buying a ticket.

Probably already buried under hundred of other release announcements.

Even worse: when you go to a devlog, there is a buy button and no indication whatsoever that you already bought it.  At least the actual game pages have the download links at the top if you already bought it; the devlog pages have no such thing.

Magical duels, and the mice are their familiars.

The actual content aside, there are two problems with the presentation:

• You have set the project as free with a minimum price on one file.  This makes it impossible to put the asset pack on sale, and it attracts people looking for freebies instead of people willing to pay.  It is better to set a price for the whole project and then mark the file you want to give away for free as a free demo.
• You don't have any demonstration for how the animations will actually look when animated.  You should put some animated gifs on your page.

I'd prefer just the health bar over just the portrait.  If you want a HUD that takes up minimal screen space while providing clear, accurate, easily readable information, then it's hard to beat an unadorned health bar.

Why are you creating a new project?

Definitely sprite sheets.  I don't use sprite assets directly in my game, I process them in Aseprite first, and importing (properly aligned) sprite sheets in Aseprite is much easier than importing hundreds of individual files.

Aseprite files would be even better than sprite sheets for me.

I think you'll find that the very lowest rated games are not actually all that interesting to study for things to avoid.  Games that bad don't happen accidentally.  Either somebody was actively trying to make a bad game to play a joke on the player, or somebody just put no effort at all into making their game good.

Actually almost all of my reviews are in the 2-4 star range.  I only give five star reviews for perfect games that cannot be improved, and I only give one star reviews for total utter garbage.

As a user of pixel art assets, I usually end up changing the colors anyway for consistency with my other art.

For me it's like 99% single player, 0.9% local cooperative, 0.1% local PvP, and 0% non-local multiplayer.

Another crappy idea: you know how crappy mobile games try to make money through in-game purchases, gachas, and ads?  Make that the entire game.  Gachas that contain ads that unlock in-game purchases for more gachas, with no actual game behind any of it.

A war game played in actual real time, where wars take months to years of playing time.  Bonus points for playing as a soldier why needs to patrol around the camp for months before dying from a bombing, without ever seeing an enemy soldier.

A game about being a soldier in a time of peace.

A game about some criminal activity (e.g. piracy, street races, theft, whatever) where the game prevents you from actually breaking any laws, including the really little ones.

I like yellow on black better than black on yellow, but I'm not sure that yellow needs to be there at all.  Or if you really like yellow, at least go for consistency and make all text the same color on the same background.

I really dislike the black-on-yellow text in both of them.  It doesn't fit the color scheme in the first one. The second one doesn't have a color scheme, which is already bad, but the black-on-yellow text just makes it worse.

I am much more interested in the training data than the actual AI bot.  If all the bot is doing is regurgitating mangled design advice from other people, then I'd rather go to the source and get my design advice properly credited and unmangled.

If I wanted to collaborate over the internet, I'd find a cheap VPS and load Fossil on that (or Git, if the rest of the team insists).  I could use the same VPS for transferring static files, if I ever had anything too big to fit into my source control system, but that should only happen very rarely.  Or I could use Github like everybody else.

But I don't (want to collaborate over the internet), so it's all moot.  I use USB sticks (set of three, rotated weekly) and other computers on my LAN for backup.

I would consider a publicly released freeware game to be neither "personal" and "commercial".  Same category as charity work, public service announcements, and political speech.

But, yeah, it's better to ask the author directly instead of a bunch of armchair lawyers.  And if you need real legal advice, find yourself a real lawyer.

If you like retro point-and-click adventure games, check out The Telwynium.  Don't let the beautiful but primitive EGA-style graphics fool you, this one actually has a really strong plot.  Non-comedic stories often fall flat in adventure games, but this one works really, really well, and the puzzles make sense in the context of that story.  The only comparable classic adventure game I can think of is Loom.

The game is pay-what-you want, supports all three major desktop operating systems, and even comes with source code.

I think this is a packaging problem.

When I download Linux games on itch, I often get something similar, a directory with a bunch of files, none of which start the game if I double-click on them.  That's because:

• A directory with a a bunch of files is the norm for Windows games.  As a Linux user, I prefer AppImages, and Mac users obviously prefer application bundles, but Windows developers usually don't know how to create those, or why they're useful, or just can't be bothered to do so.
• On Linux and Mac, the actual program file is marked by setting the executable bit on the file system.  Windows does not have the equivalent, so games packaged on Windows often don't have the executable bit set when unpacked on Linux or Mac.
• In order to run the game, you need to find the program file, set its executable bit, and then double-click it to run it.  The command line for this is "chmod +x <file>", and there's probably also a way to do this through the graphical file manager (Finder?).

Frac is the only 3D Tetris I ever played, and the only one I ever intend to play.

The longest one I know is Spica, Chinatsu and Haruka's Enchanting, Marvelous, and quite frankly Elaborate quest to save their (cute) girlfriend!!!  Which is fairly long, but probably not the longest.

For music and 3D art, yes.  For 2D art, screenshots and embedded images can serve the same purpose, so downloadable demos are a lot less important.

I tried testing this game on Linux (Lubuntu 22.04 LTS), and it doesn't work.  Error message:

./Peppy: error while loading shared libraries: libGLEW.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

(I do have GLEW installed, but it's at version 2.2.)