itch.io

I don't know, I searched for "cave" and the first relevant result I found was on the second page.  And it's not like cave assets are particularly rare.

I'm not a great fan of equipment damage in games.  I mean, yeah, stuff breaks in real life, but having to replace equipment every thirty minutes is neither realistic nor fun.  So I would use a system where you need a skill roll to successfully block with a shield, but the shield takes either no or only minimal damage on a successful block.  Probably less damage than the weapon, actually.

Also, don't underestimate just how effective a shield can be.  I've play-fought both with and without shields (SCA and Dagorhir), and let me tell you, you never want to be the guy without a shield fighting somebody with a shield.  The guy without the shield needs to actively protect his whole body.  The guy with the shield mostly needs to actively his head and feet, because the shield already protects most of his body just by being there.

You have five different projects, all of them the same game, all with extremely lazy pages (meaningless names, undescriptive descriptions, some of them without screenshots), all of them published within a few days of each other.  This is a good reason for quarantining your games.

This seems like it should be really simple to fix.  If a tag disables the NSFW filter then filter out the tag itself if the NSFW filter is turned on.

Penis in vagina = porn.

Penis in meat grinder = NSWF horror.

Finger in eye = horror, but arguably SFW.

If you had to expose a child to one of them, which one would it be?

Yeah, it fits your monitor, which is great if you're the only one to play it.  On my monitor (2160p, no desktop scaling, no browser scaling), it's unpleasantly small.  Full screen would fix this.  (Also, there's some text (?) on the bottom of the game that gets cut off.)

I don't think horror is inherently less objectionable than porn.  Pictures of people having sex isn't going to traumatize any mentally healthy child, but graphic horror might.  In extreme causes, I'd say that if you can stomach certain graphic horror, that's a sign that you aren't mentally healthy!

That said, there are obviously different types of horror (and different types of porn for that matter), including child-appropriate horror, so it depends very much on the specifics of the work in question.

Here's an account with well over a hundred projects.  Here's another.  If you can match that level of quality, having that many project pages shouldn't be a problem.

I'm not trying to police anybody's interests or even enforce a specific style, but I do think that the monster-girls tag should be restricted to, well, girls (who are also monsters).  Male elves should be tagged monster-boys (assuming that "elves" even qualify as "monsters"), old harpies should be tagged monster-old-women, and eldritch mermaids should just be tagged monsters.

"Monster girls" implies to me monsters that are female, young-looking, and have either sexual or moe appeal.  This can overlap with all of your list, but elves can be (and frequently are) male, harpies can be (and frequently are) old, and even obviously "sexy" monsters like mermaids and dryads can be presented as inhuman horrors.

A Dream of Burning Sand

Also read this:

https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-3-dev-3/#single-threaded-we...

Short version: starting at version 4.3, you can choose single-threaded web exports, which should work for you.

Yeah, I have a ton of stuff in my library, and while a lot of it is from bundles (because I actually downloaded and tried the games instead of just ignoring them), a lot of it isn't.  Even if you removed all of the bundles from my library, I would still have too many items to manually search.

My "solution" is to download all the games I own locally and put them in different subdirectories.  Obviously not an ideal solution - I'm going to miss out on all updates, and systematically downloading and labeling everything takes time - but at least I don't have games disappearing into the black void of my library where I am never going to find them again.

When I buy a bundle, I look at the number of games that I am interested in.  Other games can be a positive (because the game turns out unexpectedly good) or a negative (because they make it harder to find the good games), which kind of balances out.  Those huge charity bundles actually had some great games in them, buried under the mountains of trash.  A lot of the smaller, more focused bundles don't have anything I like.  Therefore I will continue to buy the huge charity bundles while being very careful about the smaller bundles.

The problem is that tags are selected by the game creator, and every creator has a different interpretation of what the tags mean.  The alternatives would be tags selected by community consensus and tags selected by a central authority, but these come with their own problems.

FWIW, I agree that static 3D images in a visual novels don't qualify as 3D, but I also don't think being able to rotate the camera is a requirement for a 3D game.  Grim Fandango is a 3D game despite having a static camera because the characters themselves can rotate in 3D.

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.