itch.io

One of the problems with age ratings is that they’re from opposing cultural standards. Age appropriateness doesn’t mean much on a site where we’re all from different countries and social backgrounds.

Like, nudity is all-ages in some cultures and inherently seen as representing adult-centered sexuality in others.

The definition of adult varies by legal jurisdiction.

Any depiction of gun violence is considered too dangerous for young audiences in some places and inherently dangerous in others. Same for mentions of drugs.

In the US, where Itch.io is based, the entire site is restricted on many student computer devices (often the only regular way to access the internet for Americans under 18) not because it has “NSFW” games but because it has recreational games not reviewed by an educations company.

GameVolt.com is UK-based (and formed only about five years ago). The UK has the Games Rating Authority and laws that require age ratings and publishing laws that equate digital works to physical media. The US has entirely different laws, publishing history, and politics.

In case you meant the other Gamevolt: Gamevolt.net is an Egyptian site made for Arabic games. Many games that are popular on Itch.io straight-up would be illegal there.

In my opinion, more disclosures of content on game pages by the publishers. But required age ratings here would make the current policy shift and deindexing/reviews entirely disastrous for the site.

Do you need AI to learn how to move characters? Likely no, you don’t.

The way this was done before the AI bubble formed a few years ago was to ask other game creators, programmers, or people who will help read through documentation.

Is disclose of the use of Claude or another LLM in making characters move? Likely, yes, that’s within the current definition of “AI assisted” if you keep any of the code generated by the prompt. (This is assuming there’s not a person on the other side pretending to be a Claude model.)

From itch.io’s guidance on the project edit page:

Please disclose if this project contains content produced by generative AI tools such as LLMs, ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc., even if you hand-edited it

On topic, because this is an idea thread:

If you used AI in your project, you used AI in your project. Gamedevs who are purposefully using AI can be somewhat honest and click the Yes button. That disclosure a very simple task on this site.

What counts as generative AI is a difficult discussion.

But clicking a button for animation from a single image or for generating multiple pieces of “pixel art” on the spot (which that professional artists are paid hundreds of dollars to products) isn’t likely anything but a clear Yes.

I’m not debating. Rhetorical questions are a thing. So is changing one’s mind.

You come off as offensive, and I don’t feel like dealing with that without the filters in the blocking tool here.

You can still post. Obviously.

No one but the Community moderator is obligated to read your post or follow your orders.

The consensus among the creators I know seems to be that honest disclosure is best; but anyone who can should put noise, traps, popular public domain materials, or “poison” in each project to reduce the scraping’s efficiency.

May the models train on hundreds of bagel dogs that are given names like Caramel, Camel, and One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple Stuffy Eater for serious-sounding games with competing game mechanics.

I feel the need to step up and clarify several points for the internet record….

A single illustration is not the same thing as an animation.

“AI” image generators don’t work without a training dataset. The vast majority of those sets are full of stolen images and secret movement tracking.

If you used AI in your project, you used AI in your project. Gamedevs who are purposefully using AI can be somewhat honest and click the Yes button. That disclosure a very simple task on this site.

Balaclavas are worn the vast majority of times for warmth or for fire protection. That’s what the article of clothing is made to do. That’s why it’s sold in camping supply and sporting good stores (where handknitting for someone close by isn’t the norm).

The same groups trying to push the message that face coverings as criminal are also using abusive AI systems to take away codified civil rights.

A better analogy for the core discussion: You have a right to take a photo of your own face, but sharing your photo is not the same as Photoshopping it into a video clip of someone who had no consent.

By the way, pixel art doesn’t all look the same. I would suggest you go look at specific collections of different artists, who agreed to participate in the collections, so you might see how different the art styles can be for snakes smaller than 48x48-pixels. I would suggest that if what I could believe you understand it’s not okay to copy the images and try to pretend they’re yours. Additionally: some of us put hours into small art pieces to the style how we want. It’s annoying how AI users refuse to acknowledge there are techniques, personality, and human experience that go into real artwork. The same goes for animation styles– it’s not all the same.

The disclosure might be available in the same place for all projects. When you go to your Dashboard and select to Edit a game, do you see the “AI generation disclosure” section about three-fourths down the page?

That’s on the player’s side.

The player could be using Waterfox.

Awesome. Email sent.

Where did the pixel art in the generator’s dataset come from?

I’ve seen AI images here on Itch.io that appear to have been based on the actual art made by people I know from other sites. I’ve been wondering if that’s somehow a coincidence.

I’ve also seen pixel artists give up on sharing any art online because the constant scraping of all our work wore them out. Other pixel artists who used to lead drawing events pulled back behind paywalls to reduce abuse. With what I’ve witnessed in other art forms, it’s hard to believe the pixel “art” programs were built on as much stolen art as the other types were.

But it would be a tiny amount or comfort (with how the AI industry is burning up our planet, polluting essential resources for quick text-to-image-to-text and chatbot production, and spreading harmful propaganda developed by artist-hating fascists) if these responses from other pixel artists were from paranoia, not actual abuse.

(I know my writing, photos, and graphic designs were scraped without my consent. I’m not sure my pixel art has.)

Not to pile onto the diversion, but there are some concerning comments in this thread.

I know as a perpetually starving artist with an idealistic lean that working on creative projects while physically hungry is painfully difficult. Passing out messes with the flow, you know?

I’ve had to live outside permanent housing unwillingly, and the only random human corpse I’ve seen up close was an unhoused man who froze to death.

Being poor in the US, where I live is dangerous. Rich people here aren’t arrested for existing in public or hanging around their (one and only) home (when they have one). The rich are rarely killed waiting around in jail for months for a slow and unjust trial. But that happens to the poor at distressingly high rates.

Anyhow, with $11k, I’d repair my bathroom and food garden in hopes it will all endure the next weather disaster, replace my digital drawing devices and switch to solar, or I would take a much needed medical vacation to get the healthcare I’ve had to put off for years.

Your situation might be very different. If you had an extra car and no need to avoid the brink of your destruction, then it’s great that you’re helping with the cashflow to other artists. I hope your game development goes well.

But also… I’d like to point out that quality and cost are not equivalent.

To answer your question: I haven’t put in any money to my games. The cost has been whatever the increase in the power bill has been since I started running animation and audio tests late at night. That’s paid by my spouse’s hard labor while struggle to come out of chronic disability.

Actually, I feel bad about that… the extra energy use….

I enjoy how dynamic your art is.

How do you feel about communicating outside of Discord? If that would be okay, I would be happy to talk about my interactive fiction. I’m in the US, but I’m not tied to any particular timezone in my schedule.

I’ll likely be pulling back my creative ambition this month to work on a simpler project, a short story with a MerMay theme. The part I most need help with is on the character illustrations.

If you happen to look past my profile: the “Spirit of the Latch” characters have been extremely time intensive, made with pixel arts processes on broken devices. I don’t want to repeat that, personally. My illustrator for “Growing Mold of You” has returned his focus to his own writing. That’s pretty much all of my experience with character sprites, beyond sorting through assets and trying to figure out permissions. I don’t have strict preferences. Especially for this project, you’d be as welcome to ask a bunch of specific questions with check-ins as to do your own thing off of basic character descriptions.

This is unpaid, with a possibility of revshare if you would prefer hat.

Nice.

By the way, I love the name of the bundle. I’m surprised I haven’t seen that used before.

The irony in the original poster’s situation is that Newgrounds, like Itch.io, is a site that does compromise on AI use in projects. At least one of the most recognizable moderators there is a big defender of AI in art spaces (as irritating as that is to many members).

Newgrounds also a platform with decades-old arguments about what should be allowed. Tweening, for example, is as old as Disney animation, but it gets downvotes and loud complaints when it shows up in the top of the Movie portals. Tweening isn’t hurting people like the AI industry is; there are simply strong opinions there.

It was obviously the way the AI-generated content was presented that made the moderator angry.

Just go through the music that’s available for free to game developers on this site and choose one. You don’t even need to be as nice a community member as to leave a star rating or appreciative comment on your favorites. That would still be worlds better than ignoring all the actual musicians and their generous offerings round here.

As I said before. That’s why I’ll test out what Analytics picks up one of these days.

Still, there’s a lean toward moral stances there. Itch.io continues to promote X-Twitter, angered many gamers with its actions last year, and presents ads on download pages.

I figure the lack of posts about Itch.io in the Mastodon areas I hang around are an indicator, too. I post to #Itchio about once a month but seem to be one of the most active users of the tag. But me and server admins are wary of some of the biggest instances.

In the end, tho, there’s not enough info to know.

I agree that maintaining visitor privacy is good, actually.

Hi, Lila,

I’m Acin, looking to write and program a Steampunkish science fantasy with two potential love interests (male and female, with different intersecting storylines) and a choose-your-gender/-name protagonist who wants to help them save their city.

The characters are of two species, human and “demon” (might be renamed).

That would be, at rough guess, five main characters plus backgrounds for each.

My preferred method of collab is by a closed communication board here on Itch.io. Email is okay, too. I don’t go to Discord.

Yeah, one appeared immediately after I asked. Mastodonites just aren’t aren’t as interested in what’s on Itch.io.

do indie developers use any kind of analytics software to track their games?

Yes.

Or is it just “vibes”?

That, too. Not everyone looks at analytics.

I check the Dashboard Analytics areas here on itch.io out mainly as a way of checking visibility or out of curiosity.

Tho, in general, I feel descriptive feedback is much more valuable than statistics are. Numbers don’t say why someone visits, plays the game, or downloads (or attempts to) multiple times. Do they enjoy playing it, or do they resent ever learning of the game after dealing with a bunch of crashes that only they experience?

What should I do?

Finish the game first.

I have a suspicion that visits from Mastodon sites aren’t counted. Do you want to test this with me? Because the stats have looked off for a while now.

I could follow your itch.io link on Mastodon and poked around both signed in and signed out, then you could check if any visits show up in your analytics. l

Might be a translation issue.

https://itch.io/t/6250857/why-is-everything-

Trusting Google’s Gemini with anything seems to me like a bad idea.

But here are unofficial answers your questions from a fellow developer:

• Your public game likely was delisted for the same reason thousands of games were delisted since in the past year: it has adult NSFW content.

• From observation, I’m guessing your game as it is won’t be reindexed. You have images in a realistic style of characters who look like teenagers being “corrupted” by an adult character in a sex game. You might be lucky to retain any visibility as the current practices go.

• Why did this happen now? If you’re accepting payments for a similar game, or it looks by keywords that you could be, then that might have flagged your account for another internal review.

• I’m not sure what counts as a duplicate game to the itch.io team, but I feel that’s not the issue here.

My recent experience with having a copy of a game in a restricted page while another was public didn’t delist anything. Altho, that was for testing and development, with the no payment option. Specifics might matter?

Plus: Remove the promotion of Twitter/X in the publication confirmation emails.

Every time I see the links on itch.io feels gross.

When I see news about Musk’s X pushing Grok and/or encouraging X users to replace images posted on that platform with AI junk— or when the US government announces X is officially a propaganda platform— I want to ask, “Is this what Leafo wants itch.io associated with?”

Is it?

Fabulous character design.

Just to confirm the license. May the modified sprite or a derivative be used as a character in a “commercial” game? I’ve seen competing interpretations of the line between “can’t be resold or redistributed” vs. “can be used in any project.”

Sharing more info might bring in interest. What’s your project? Preferred methods of communication? Is there a timeline? What would you would doing (like music and coordination)? Do you have experience? What are you hoping to get from the project?

I wanted to make sure one character was talking far less than another in an interactive short story of mine. This tool worked great for that!

If I get digital money this year, I’d like to return for the additional features. Those would be handy for checking if narrative tracks are becoming unbalanced and quick reporting of writing progress.

This Lint+ word counter offers better visibility of what’s in the project than we get with the default Ren’Py Lint (as nice as it is).

Huh, interesting.

Thank you for clarifying that.

Not only delisting but quarantined. The message I got on the download page mentions a connection to the Ukraine.

I understand the country contains a warzone because of Russian aggression that has a cyberwarfare problem, but it would be sad if that’s a reason to suppress creators. Some of the best online artists, writers, and musicians are Ukrainian; their projects have nothing to do with the war.

Excellent! It’s easier to not have to choose one project to focus on. 😅

I’m sorry. The letter I referred to was from the FTC. (The FCC and FTC are similar when it comes to digital tech, and they collaborate. But it was a typo.)

Looking at the letter again, I realized the intention seems obvious to me only because I’ve read so much that relates the issue.

Like, Trump Org fought with at three major banks, two in the US and one in Europe, when it was investigated for the financial fraud that eventually led to convictions that banned Donald Trump and some of his kids from doing business in New York for a set number of years. This is separate from the 30+ felony convictions of the current PotUS for falsifying business records to hide his hiring of a sex worker. It’s separate from all the lawsuits from the Trumps not paying their bills and misappropriating government funds.

There’s the history of arguably illegal campaign fundraising and trade deals, too.

Financial institutions have plenty of reasons to avoid dealings with Trump or any business he’s associated with.

With the FTC, the GOP-held Congress, the Supreme Court with its unethical behavior, there’s high levels of pandering to the Trumps’ self interests and even more of a push to follow through on Project 2025, which is extremely threatening towards everything deemed “pornographic” (including entire demographics of citizens).

The current FTC is considered loyal to this GOP.

Payment processors and banks were refusing to handle fundraisers for Jan 6th rioters and other “political” endeavors associated with criminal activity. The White House insists the courts are wrong, saying Trump’s supporters don’t do anything illegal. Do financial institutions have a right to deny anyone services without a court order? Who knows at this point.

It all looks too complicated to me for a vague letter coming from someone taking away healthcare in line with the same document that says Americans who make or are anything pornographic to be hopeful. Not as long as the government is run like this.

That’s not even considering the Epstein financial schemes, with Trump and people he’s close to being listed some thousands of times in the FBI’s Epstein Files.

Thinking about this today… I have a small amount of sympathy for Leafo and others who are hosting sites. But it’s hard to know when there’s not regular, open, honest communication about the decisions.

This was also brought ~60 days ago.

https://itch.io/t/5893902/getting-unsolicited-emails-from-game-creators-even-after-adjusting-profile-settings

I agree it’s a serious problem. There were previous mentions of interested buyers avoiding bundles because of concern of a flood of unwanted marketing emails.

Can we submit multiple projects?

Are mermen allowed?

Eleven months since first upload:

• 1,526 Views
• 199 Downloads ($0)
• 27 Followers

Top right drop-down menu (v icon beside name) > Dashboard

What Ratsnake Games said.

The site owner’s side of all this is a mystery. The government side is more transparent.

I read the executive order, the FCC’s letter, statements made by Trump officials, and international news that relates to all this. Look at the EO again. The intention is to force banks to allow the convicted criminals and suspected fraudsters to use financial services again.

That push puts everyone at risk, but the Trump Org family (convicted of criminal fraud) and their business partners are all about grift. The current US regime doesn’t have any reason to protect indie creators or adults-only businesses that aren’t a part of its own (suspected) dealings. That would go against the Trumped-up Project.

Some bundles are organized on BlueSky or social media.

Some use the game jam system here, so submissions from the jam entry period are considered for the bundle. Watch for mention of a bundle in “jams” that look relevant to your novel.

Edited for formatting.

My thoughts on this idea—

• It adds confusion to a system that needs more clarity.

• I agree with the comment above that a bigger problem is with how rare voting is.

• The suggested calculation ignores that there are valid reasons for a dissenting vote, like when a game that is no longer maintained breaks, making the first one-star vote a warning, or when the first five star is given after a group targets the project with three stars and nasty comments.

• What number is X? What happens when the next one– or five–star rating is given outside that percentage?

My thoughts on AI companies for parts instead of using stock assets or commissions for trade from actual creators— who gets money for what is a concern of big publishers. No one else focuses on that every day. It’s so far down the long list of concerns about general AI use for most indies that it’s laughable.

To put this simply (tho if you’re very young, you won’t likely believe me): kids in the garage who choose to put AI slop in their first games are going to be embarrassed and disgusted by that decision years from now. They could use anything like the free assets a bunch of artists here on itch.io offer. We share without charge not because we’ll somehow make money off the downloads but because we’re hoping someone, somewhere, will make a cool thing with it. But it’s not cool to be willingly associated with the humongous AI tech industry scheme we were all pulled into.

In the demo, the sound is the same ‘ta-tah!’ all the way through. The video is more a sound effect repeating for a long time than a song. I didn’t know there was anything else until I turned the volume all tbe way up and listened carefully. Was there a mistake in the YouTube upload?

I’d be happy for a better way to communicate than the awkward contortions needed now (with my first game team talking across four sitesnot counting the file transfer service).

But….

Managed via Supabase (authentication and database) and Discord OAuth (connection). We receive from Discord: identifier, user name, avatar, and optionally your email.

What about when we don’t have and don’t want a Discord account?

Seems to me this could be set up on Matrix OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect or something like that.

As-is, jam organizers give up moderation control over their Discord servers to someone they don’t know. Regular accounts get tied to a new app. I can imagine that’s less tempting than to stick with the familiar. (Not that I know for sure. I gave up on Discord a long while back.)