itch.io

This initial release is a draft; it hasn't been playtested. It's possible the energy points should be adjusted up or down. And it could use a condensed listing of the cards; I didn't have time before the deadline.

I'm very open to comments about it.

The issue isn't whether AI/LLMs can generate interesting and useful game content. (They almost can; it still needs a lot of human oversight, but we are reaching a point where they can generate simpler types of content and art without more than a normal proofing check.)

The actual issues include:

• Whose content is being used to train the AI, and whether that content was gathered ethically (or even legally),
• Is the AI being used by indie creators to fill in the gaps of their own skills/abilities, without which the content would never be created or released, or is it being used by corporations that are trying to reduce their human wages in order to increase shareholder profits - for content they could budget for, but instead will use to drive profits rather than reduce the cost of the finished product
• The amount of damage generative-AI databanks & processors are doing to the environment, which is nearing cryptocurrency/NFT levels.

Much like crypto, there's no profit-making endgame here. Gen-AI is plenty useful for brainstorming, for making a rough outline to fill in later, for draft boilerplate, for sketch ideas, for clipart-style images. One of the best uses I've seen is "generate a newspaper article about X topic" to be thrown at players in a TTRPG - it doesn't matter if the article sounds bland or the details are a little off. The GM doesn't have to spend half an hour writing 300 words of "in 1982, a similar creepy incident happened to this college's football team." AI is great at generating flavor text, as long as the details don't matter AND a human is checking the results for basic consistency. (The AI will not notice that parent & child should share the same last name.)

But it's being used to generate real news articles, without human oversight, and for those, it matters that the "facts" aren't real. And the amount of processing and cross-checking required to auto-generate accurate content is beyond our current level of computers - and beyond the level we expect to have.

When they realize there's never going to be a jump to "this can write entire books that actual people want to read/create movies people will pay to watch by throwing some keywords into a generator," that funding will evaporate and the public-usable tools will vanish along with the money.

Because it's impossible to identify AI-generated content, especially when you get away from visual art. (False positives exist in art but not to the scale that they do in text.)

Any "ban this content" rule would result in unpopular devs being harassed and having complaints filed that they have AI-generated content - and then they're stuck trying to prove that they actually wrote their visual novel dialogue instead of developing it through ChatGPT.

There's no point in banning something you can't reliably identify; that just makes the ban a weapon that would be used against marginalized creators.

why even allow assets that have had no significant human editing?

There's a difference between "no significant human editing" and "contains some AI-generated features" - and right now, the tag won't differentiate between those.  A ban on "all AI-generated content" would include "I made 30 distinct character tokens and then used AI to create color-shifted versions of them." It would include banning randomly-generated maps in TTRPG supplements, where the map is AI-made but all the description is created by the writer.

...Would it include all images edited with Photoshop, since it has a lot of AI features now? Text edited with Google Drive's spellcheck?

I can see value in marking AI-generated assets (especially since those will be in the public domain, definitely something you want to know before adding them to another work), but banning means needing to define where the edges of "AI-generated" are - and, without a way to identify AI works, means any easy way for bullies to harass the people they don't like, by accusing them of something that can't be disproved.

The tag looks like it's required for "project contains content produced by generative AI tools," not "generative AI tools were used in the production of this project."

"Assets comprised of generative AI (even if modified afterwards) that are not tagged will no longer be eligible for indexing..."

...How will untagged assets be identified, especially if modified after?  I didn't think we had tools that could accurately identify all AI-generated content. (We definitely can't identify AI-generated text, but that is less likely to be included in asset packs. )

I can definitely see hostile reporting of assets being an upcoming issue.  What will be used to decide if a project does or does not contain AI-generated content?

There's an error - "Then, draw a card for each item: the rank will tell you what the item is and the rank will tell you who has lost it."
2nd "rank" should be "suit."(Bolding added.)

This is charming and I am looking forward to having the time to play it through.

Hi - I saw this on the TTRPGs for Accessible Gaming Charity Bundle. I've made a copy in Word if you'd like it. (Converting image PDFs to real text is one of my hobbies.) I'm elf_herself on Discord; itch.io has no way to send files.

I've received mine. You have to fill out the Google form; they will add the PDFs to your Paizo account. If you don't have a Paizo account (I didn't), they will tell you to make one and write back to them so they can add it to your account. 

It has a single-file PDF version, plus a collection of the chapters as separate PDFs. It has social DRM - it puts your name & email address in tiny grey text at the top and bottom of every page.

Looks like game was removed and can't be downloaded anymore.  Is there any way to get a copy?

Thanks.

There's no game download anymore.

Great; thanks! 

I saw the Unity debacle go down and am not surprised. I was also wondering "how the hell are they going to charge per install since, y'know, there is no record of what I install on my computer when the internet is off?" And the answer was "oh we pretty much only mean mobile; we kinda forgot everything else existed," and... yeah, there was no way to take their answers as anything other than "we are going to look for ways to squeeze money out of a pack of users who got involved with this because it was free."

I'll check back later and hope to see the new version when it's ready!

I got this in a bundle a while ago but missed it in my early round of downloading. The game seems to be gone. Is there now downloadable version? (Demo/draft version, maybe?)

As someone who buys a lot of charity bundles - I am fine with some of the entries being beta versions, or even limited versions or demos for a paid version. There's a ton of games on itch.io; I am never going to browse through them all. Someone putting their demo version in this bundle tells me that they support causes I care about (or at least, they don't object to causes I care about), and gives me a chance to look at them in a context other than "there are 35,000 games with this tag on itch.io."

That said, as an advertising ploy, it seems weak. I would have to really love the demo to consider buying the game because... I just got 500 other games to look at.  The demo is going to have to really stand out for me to remember it the next time I'm looking at standalone games to buy.

...I love seeing the variety of games people are making, even if some of them aren't to my taste. If it's not something that fits my interests, I don't mind that I only got the demo version.

As long as all the content is technically legal for minors, even if they (or their parents) would prefer them not to see it, that's fine. 

In the US, registration is not required for copyright, but it changes the amount that you can win in court over a copyright violation. (This may be a violation of the Berne Convention but the only way to find out would be someone not in the US, pushing for a copyright case in the US, not getting the results they wanted, and then taking it to an international venue.) Without registration, you can only sue for provable damages; for registered works, you can push for more than that. 

For what kind of rights: Copyright in the US is a limited-term economic monopoly. It covers copying, public performance, derivatives (like translations; what else counts as "derivative" is a game for lawyers) and a few ancillary rights. In the US, copyright does not cover "moral rights" that exist in Europe and some other places. Music recordings have their own special (nightmare) section of the law.

Unpublished works are copyrighted - this is relevant for things like "an author's rough draft of a novel"; someone can't grab it and publish without permission. Copyright exists/is granted the moment a thing is put in "fixed form." An unpublished game in your cloud storage is copyrighted; if someone hacks your account and steals it, they can't (legally) publish it without your consent.

There are rules about updates and new editions that would apply to registration of video games. I don't know the details, just that books have been doing expanded/updated editions for ages.

(But also: yeah, this is not a good venue for discussing the philosophy of copyright.)

Copyright law is also how poor people avoid being exploited by mega-corporations. 

It's not easy for an individual artist or self-published writer to sue Disney - but copyright law is what prevents Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. etc. from just mass-grabbing stories and art and turning them into movies for their own profit. The fact that the law exists keeps them from grabbing everything they can. 

There are occasional cases of "we're pretty sure this was grabbed from someone else's idea," but Sega couldn't grab Flappy Bird and distribute it through their channels because of copyright.

Copyright law has problems and needs a major overhaul but it is better than no protection at all.

They were good thoughts, and will be useful for sorting out other game(s) in the same setting. :)

Other potential "why this hasn't been salvaged" options:

• Anyone can restore an abandoned station; tearing it apart for salvage runs into complex legal issues.
• (Maybe anyone can't just restore it - but the hippies have high-status connections and that part's been dealt with.)
• Travel to & from here is really expensive or troublesome; something-something warp-gate, magnetized-asteroid-field, skirt-the-edge-of-hostile-alien-territory,  etc. Making the trip once or twice isn't a problem, but regular back-and-forth is near impossible. 
• The coordinates for the station are wrong in most of the record-books; people have tried to find it for salvage and failed. (The hippies insist they got the correct coordinates "in a vision.")
• Whatever drove away the original commerce in the area - disease, bad cosmic rays, solar flares, weird alien breeding cycles, etc. - had to die down before salvage could be attempted. It's all long gone, but so is the interest in the area; it's no longer news anyone is paying attention to.

Hope you have fun with it!

I'm thinking of making a related adventure that's the same thing from the hippies' perspective. And since that won't have a one-page limit, I'll be able to go into more detail about the setting.

I know I was hand-wavy about "not worth being salvaged." I figured it's in a very remote area, so nobody wants to restore it, and possibly it's made with obsolete materials/tech so it's not worth taking apart and hauling somewhere that the pieces could be sold. (There might be other reasons, but basically that's all left up to the GM and players. The key thing is "Nobody else really wants this; up to you exactly why that is.")

Thanks!

I wrote this after re-watching the original Star Trek episode with the space hippies. I love the space hippies! ...The starship's crew does not, for the most part, love the space hippies. The captain found them interesting but naive and disruptive.

How the GM/players find them is going to be up to the group. 

Thanks for commenting!

I'm aware it's fuzzy.

I meant, games whose tags would normally make them blocked by the "don't show me adult content" filter, but are viewable in a tag search.  (I'm also aware that games tagged with something like 'sex' does not mean there is actually sexual content; accurate tagging is a whole separate issue.)

If there are games hidden from general search by the adult content setting - those games should not come up in a more specific search or tag search. I'm not concerned with where itch.io draws the lines, but the lines should be the same no matter what kind of search is being done.

Be wary of offers to install software on your machine that claim to do the impossible. If "block all adult content" were something easy to do, we wouldn't have entire industries built on providing filtering services to corporations. 

It's possible someone could build a browser plugin that blocks all adult-labeled content on itch.io. It won't also work on Steam, or drivethrurpg, or youtube, or vimeo, or AO3, or tumblr, or twitter, or bluesky. They all use different methods to label "adult" content. (And they don't all agree on what "adult content" is.)

How are you going to hide "all adult content?" Not all websites label it, and those that do, don't all use the same methods. I'm not sure itch.io's labeling is visible from the outside, other than the tags on the games.

Some jams have a Discord; those are good places to find other people to team up with. 

Joining a jam is very easy - go to the jams page and find one (or more) that fit in your interests and skill set. Some are open to any kinds of games; a lot are more restricted - specific themes, or specific game engines, or tabletop games only, and so on. Some encourage teamwork; some don't allow it. 

Finding a good team for collaboration is likely to take some time as you get to know people, either in the specific game jam community area, or in Discord or similar places.

If you don't want to worry about copyright issues, then yes, use only material you have made. But that's not what's required. People are allowed to use some aspects of other people's copyrighted material legally. How much, and in what way... that gets complicated.

A lot of us want to build in what other people have made - want to show it in a new way, or have a different perspective on it, or use existing characters with different game mechanics. 

I tend to think this is transformative use, not derivative - but I am not a video game developer and not a lawyer; it's not my opinion that matters.

I can say that the most common reaction to a big company deciding something is derivative/infringing, is to demand it get removed; there is almost never any other penalty. (Going to court takes money. Even if they would win the court case - there's no point in suing a small indie developer; they won't get that money back because most indie devs don't have it to give.)

I agree that adult content should be filtered out even when you're searching for specific tags - you should not have to know which terms are "all adult content" to keep them blocked. This is a bug that deliberately shows adult contents to people who have selected the "do not show me adult content" option, including minors. 

Someone (not a minor) should do some research into what tags can bypass the "don't show me adult content" option.  (If you search for ren'py, will you see adult ren'py games? Or is it only if you search the tags that definitely mean explicit sexual content? In which case... wow, that is a STUPID feature.)

If people want to see adult content and are dismayed when their searches for those tags come up blank, the page can have a message that says "You have this setting blocked in your profile options. To see these results, you will need to check the box that says..." 

When I search on Steam, I often get results that say "4 titles have been excluded based on your preferences." (Or 12 titles. Or 37 titles. I have a lot of popular game tags blocked.) If I want to see those results, I can adjust my settings.

Fanworks are a legally gray area because some use of other people's works without permission is allowed. This includes using pieces for reviews and commentary, and transformative uses of the original work. The trouble is figuring out what's "transformative."

"Derivative"  works are a copyright violation (in the US) IF the copyright owner complains. But if they don't care, it's fine, and they can decide what's worth their effort; it's not like trademark where they have to do something about infringing works. They can decide "that fangame is derivative, but I don't mind it; I'm not going to have it removed" and they can still go after other copyright violations.

"Transformative" works, including "parody" (which is a legal term; doesn't mean it has to be funny), are legal uses of someone else's material, even without permission, even if they hate it.

The line between "derivative" and "transformative" is decided in court, for individual cases, and is inconsistent as hell. People write dissertations on this. People get PhDs trying to describe the differences.

But the key part is: Only the rights-owner can complain about copyright infringement. If it's not your IP, it's not your problem if someone else made a game from it.

If you want to make fan games, your best way to make sure you're in the clear, is knowing that the IP holder doesn't mind them. (Actually best is formal written permission, but nobody is expecting that. But knowing that the original rights holder is cool with fan games is pretty close.)

Japan has a much different culture about derivative/transformative uses of copyrighted material, which is why you see a lot of anime/manga zines and doujinshi and fangames.

(IANAL; TINLA)

I emailed support and have not gotten a response.

https://itch.io/my-purchases/bundles only shows the most recent 30 purchases. Is there a way to see all the bundles I've purchased? 

I figured it was likely "forgot to add." (I didn't notice it until I was almost done and then had to scramble to figure out where to put it.)

I love this game. I have made a tiny pocket version of it that I keep in an Altoids tin along with small dice and a mini-abacus to use as Taboo tokens. It's one that I regularly recommend to people interested in solo TTRPGs.

I missed that the copyright notice was on the game page! (I forgot to check.) I think you're good.

The asteroid/ship collision is an interesting combination. It's a bit hard to read at page-size, but easy enough at fit-width. Nice use of color for emphasis. Good text; the map a bit hard to sort out. This is a puzzle-ish adventure - if the players have seen it in advance, they'll have a much easier time, so the GM needs to either make sure they haven't read it, or alter a few details.  I loved how much detail there was about the ship; there's a lot to work with.

I like the symbol keys on the rooms, and how their layout works as a map/diagram. The timer is an interesting mechanic; I can see how that would add pressure to play. I like the mutations feature - that's something that might build into a long-term campaign. ("Yeah, that's Joe; he got extra eyes from the Ikaros; now he sees in shrimp colors.")

There's no CC-BY-SA statement.

Done; no problem!

The artwork is gorgeous, and I appreciate having three versions of it. Nicely compact adventure - lots of worldbuilding built into the single page!

I love the time-travel setting here. There's a lot of detail in very little space. The "intro" part is formatted a bit oddly - the title is zalgo text that's hard to read; it'd be hard to use a printout of this without the context of the game page. And the intro paragraphs are in an odd spot for a beginning - I skipped over that at first; it didn't have a "start here" look to it.

But once I got past that, I enjoyed reading. This'd be a very fun adventure to spring on a group not expecting it; the layout is simple once it's known but I could see it being wonderfully confusing to a group of PCs.

Very frustrating that the text is images, not copy-pastable and not searchable. And while this works as a system-agnostic game, it's designed for INK RPG, and that shows. But - the drawings are cute, and the roll-for-challenges list is very nice. 

Good section layout; narrow text is readable even at fit-to-page. Nice. The map could use larger numbers; they're hard to read without zooming in. This is one of the few with NPCs listed; there's a lot of good detail in only a few words. I like the "countdown" that doesn't have a specific timer - just an increasing threat level for the players to deal with.