itch.io

Is mirthal.com down?

Where are the gaming forums for 30yo+?

The in-browser preview or demo sticks on the loading screen. Nothing happens after this image.

Thank you.

Status: I’m on the search for appropriate public domain music. After I cancelled my application and posted here, the music creator returned my message that the song (under CC BY 4.0) may not be used for any game, which along with the supposed musician’s Q&A specifically encouraging game use has me questioning if the other side is only spitting out chatbot answers sans awareness of what the English-language statements mean.

This experience has me sore about using audio for anything published. I’ll make ebooks out of my games to reduce risks for the bundle.

Thank you all for putting the bundle together!

I have a question about licensing. The music I’m using in a potential entry has seemingly contradictory licensing requirements when I go around to the musician’s various websites. I will replace the music if I can’t get the terms cleared up. That change would be done by June.

If I don’t submit to the bundle early, there’s an uncomfortably high chance I won’t return to the entry form until April. So do I submit the project now, or I should I wait until I’m completely confident about all the licensing terms?

I’m sorry I didn’t get to the actual updates for the month’s work. But a new version was prepared. It’s going up tonight.

Cool set! One of these became the setting for a test lab so I could try out code for various VNs. It’s worked out well.

Below are guesses.

The “Factory Worker” views could be one person who open the page and left it opened in their browser to return to later, along with a hundred other pages over the past month. I’m not sure about the technical side of this, only that browser tabs refresh for a variety of reasons in this situation. It’s difficult to know when those refreshes count as views. After the internet is reconnected? After account logout? Never?

(For the one-tab-only readers: Bookmarking be better, sure, but bookmark searches don’t always work, failing to match up the title and keywords using exact prompts. Needing to scroll through hundreds of bookmarks has its problems, too.)

To be clear, I’m not this person for “Factory Worker”, only that I’ve noticed this technical habits seem to coincide with a jump in “popularity” of the projects.

That shift in recommendations could also be coincidence, tho. People tend to pick up interest in the same topics at the same time….

For the mismatches: itch.io and Google track visitors differently. Google keeps massive amounts of data on us collected from trackers around the internet and maybe from offline, so their profiling might make for more accurate counts. Conversely, anti-Google trackers might reduce the Google Analytics numbers while itch.io isn’t as strongly affected.

For the lower count of total itch.io views compared to page views… that’s the strangest part. Any chance the account summary pages weren’t updated when the project summary was?

What engine?

Okay, I see there are two areas to look at.

The blurriness is primarily coming from itch.io resizing your image to its default.

I’m not how you ended up 357x324 by doubling, so for an example, let’s say we have an 80x64 image. Scaling that canvas up 800% would results in a 640x512 pixels. That resizing puts us over the 630x500 pixels, close enough not to distort noticably at a glance.

512 / 640 = ~0.79 500 / 639 = 0.80

They’re similar.

324 / 357 = ~0.91

That image is not only too small, meaning it’ll get stretched out, causing blurriness, but the proportions are also off. The pixels become misshapened and blurry.

Super easy mistake to make.

The fix I know of is to change the canvas size, revise the pixel art as needed, then scale up with Sprite Size -or- Export Resize.

Aseprite upscales well.

Would you like to describe your process?

Typically, the best upscaling is by multiples of a hundred: 200%, 300%, 400%, and so on. I’ve read downscaling works best with the default Nearest Neighbor option by divisions of four: 75%, 50%, and 25%.

I’m going go post this next part here not because I think it’s what is happening, but because I wish someone had told me two years ago— Undoing what you’ve already upscaled after an original is lost should reverse what was done, but that can be messy. An example is that 33% after 300% might not return the image exactly. Using the original image for scaling each time is best.

What are you using for scaling?

A program that adds colors to pixel art during upscaling can cause blurry lines.

A note for Linux users: “An exception has occurred.” A line of code is missing. The game might not run.

The developer is likely too preoccupied to deal with this.

(heypau, to put it midly: I’m sorry for my country’s unreliable support of yours! I hope you somehow have what you need.)

The third devlog is very long, tho I took out big chunks. It has info I didn’t fit into the second post.

https://falsfiction.itch.io/spirit-of-the-latch/devlog/1389197/a-voice-of-drifting-paper-dust-formed-into-a-wooden-dowel-on-an-empty-spot-of-heart

Nice. So you know— ​The demo fails to open on mobile. An overlay image is missing.

Hi. May we use this in games or in the designs of websites that allow payments?

Gorgeous!

The new download works! Thank you.

Recently, I created a gif-style animation in my first Ren’Py visual novel during the last hour before a deadline. That experience made me wary about a different project. I would need several of the same type of animation.

Having another option than writing out 40 lines while trying to mess up the location names feels really nice.

The term scalping comes from a historic practice of removing a human scalp. In the US, ticket scalping means a third party in a trade “cutting off the top” of prices for tickets. There are similar practices by sleazy companies for other types of sales.

In that tradition, I guess game scalping means either picking up a copy of a game for cheap or for free, possibly stolen, then offering the game at a lower price than its legitimate selling price.

That would typically be bad in the way book pirating is. The original seller or creator might lose out on sales, the copies can be missing parts or deliberately contain malware, and the audience will likely suffer from a lose in trust, affecting the social dynamic. (Ethical exceptions exist.)

Scraping is similar, but that implies automation. It’s data collection. An alogorithm is set to copy games, with or without permission from the game creators, publishers, or distributors. Scraping can be for archiving, analysis, or illegal trading.

When it’s not with the knowledge and consent of the game creators or publishers, scraping is bad. It’s essentially something between spying and stealing, taking away options from the people who put their own labor and funding into the game creation.

When scrapers act on their own, game buyers and players have trouble finding accurate info about games and where they came from, game developers lose out in a bunch of ways, and there’s a higher risk of money going to unexpected places, to the people and processes that increasingly harm everyone in gaming.

Scraping and scalping are both used by scammers.

Go to the bottom of the project page and select the “Report” link. Choose the option that you feel best fits, note that the page showed up under the “No AI” tag, and send.

Some of this code and the graphics, modified, were used in my game at https://falsfiction.itch.io/spirit-of-the-latch. Thank you so much for providing these templates. Ren’py’s default menu would have felt wrong to me in the story setting.

No longer available for download?

Hi. I know not many people will be looking here so late, but this area seems a decent place to ask.

Half the votes my entry received were one-star. There was any explanation, which I know can mean anything from not being a favorite of the batch to the reader hating it.

Is anyone who played “Spirit of the Latch” willing to share what you disliked about the visual novel?

I’d appreciate the info for working on it and other projects.

Thank you! I’m glad you like it.

I’d love to be a part of an authorized bundle on itch.io (especially one that would cover a stressful medical expense!) and when I found out about this one last year, I was hoping there would be a chance. Maybe there won’t, but my point is you all were encouraging. Best of luck on your current projects or personal rest.

With the triple gut punches of AI surveillance, ID requirements, and data breach affecting 70k identity documents, there’s avid talk about moving gaming communities out of Discord.

Where are people here going to?

What do you like and dislike about other options?

Yes, please.

The second devlog is up.

https://falsfiction.itch.io/spirit-of-the-latch/devlog/1370666/sealed-with-a-kiss-2026-jam-retrospective

The devlogs are taking up too much time, because I keep rewriting them, not really sure what’s of interest to anyone who might read them.

One about background creation is up.

https://falsfiction.itch.io/spirit-of-the-latch/devlog/1360600/processing-photos-for-vn-backgrounds

The submission feed shows new uploads. Site analytics show there’s very little activity on most of our visual novels either way. I’m giving the few people who are interested the updates….

I’d like guidance on this. Is uploading a new cover or icon image during voting okay?

What about new versions of the game? It’s hard holding off on sharing improved images and script here. The idea people are stuck dealing with the wrong sprites, janky animation, typos, and filler lines that weren’t hidden with two weeks is stressful.

A grumpy/sunshine, size gap, and age gap story with a good ending.

I enjoyed the plant names and how we got to see the ingredients at the end.

This is nitpicky for a game; but because this trope is troubling in a way that I as someone comparable to the character in a few features don’t see mentioned in queer or other relevant spaces: cisgender men with breasts (“man boobs” or gynecomastia) are 50 times more common than being trans of any identity.

Many men AMAB that develop gynecomastia bind their chests.

The plot-moving injury in the story was shown lower than described. Using another word like “gut” or “torso” would work to remain vague about the reveal of what Komos is striving to do with magic.

Whew, I didn’t get the explosion on either play-through. The endings feel satisfying in how both guys make for good partners for different reasons. The escalation feels abrupt, but that seems to be typical for jam entries. There’s room to develop the relationships!

Personally, I’d like a suggestion up front that this is a world with fantasy magic and beings. I’d somehow forgotten it’s a requirement for the game jam and was surprisd when the mentions came up. Maybe there could be an earlier mention in the wheat field as the characters talking about their interests?

I like that we get to know a little about the player character in the conversation with her coworker. The coworker set up the hospital conflicts well. All the variety of expressions on the character sprites is nice. The character graphics for the kisses are good representations.

Playing was fun.

I’d like to confirm this, too.

Four devlogs are in the works for this weekend. These are to cover last week.

I have too many thoughts on this first virtual novel…

Another devlog should go up a week or two later to cover the progress I’ve made during the start of this month.

To explain the game versions—

SOTL-web_demo.zip was a tester the day before the deadline, because I was worried there would be upload problems. (There were.) This version only has the opening of the story.

SpiritOfTheLatch-web.zip has the complete story. Like the demo, it’s meant to play in a browser connected to a server that will play the media.

The browser embed was my jam entry. The mobile interface was messed up on my first uploads, so that’s been changed.

SpiritOfTheLatch-2-1-1_linux.zip is the current web browser version but for playing from your own (Linux) desktop. This might require a copy of Ren’Py to run. Ren’Py is free from its website at home page at https://www.renpy.org/.

日本語のドキュメントは以下にあります:

https://ja.renpy.org/doc/html/

The initial problems seemed to have had something to do with how I’d organized my project. Not exactly sure what was wrong, but what worked was moving code and custom GUI images (like for mouse.png) then changing directory names so existing directories didn’t match the “{ProjectName}-web” directory generated by Ren’Py Launcher into its distribution directory.

Amazingly helpful. Thank you so much.

Interesting premise! Plus beautiful art.

Will there be a web browser version (or a Linux download) for players who don’t have Windows access?