itch.io

Woot!

“My Partner Died of Old Age, and All I Got Was This Catboy Polycule” is a perfect title. I’m hoping you keep it.

Some of your sprites are ugly? I don’t believe that.

Then again, I’m sure my sprites (and style of drawing) are atrocious.

You’ve got to live with what you end up with either way, so, you know, do what makes you happy.

Looks like your game coming along together well, and the premise is interesting.

I’m removing the backstory from the word count for as long as that’s my reference, not a part of the game.

Word Count: 1k for the opening scene.

Sprites: Maybe halfway through drawing full bodies for the main characters. Additional expressions later?

Only the the head and shoulders might be visible, most of the time, but even if I don’t do much else, I would like a reference for character graphics.

GUI: This has been sketched out on paper. I’ve decided to use my photos of historical sites and rural public spaces as art assets.

Sprites update: I’ve started on the main characters. Ash looks adorable with shorter hair.

Reneau is currently darker and has more rectangular features than intended, in my attempt to make the mixed-race character too pale. He’s supposed to be passably White, but I made the mistake of grabbing a deep shadow on a historic figure drawing of uniforms and going with it until I stopped to compare him with Ash’s sprite. Oops.

His skin is a pretty brown in this version, however. I might start over without a reference and squeeze in a background character using the misdraft.

A half-formed plan for the game artwork is to scarcely use it. The GUI can set up the scenery, the character sprites can be worked in to look less like dolls in theater and more like book illustrations.

The characters are bookish, as in bibliophiles. That illustrated prose style could suit them.

Speaking of suits, the US Army uniforms of the time are kind of funny. There’s a distinctive look to 19th Century cavalry, evil and creepy in view of the massively cruel crimes against humanity committed in the real history of the time; yet edging up to 1900, the Army overall was trying to figure out how French it wanted officers to look. Sashes? Badges? Medals? Tassels? Stripes? Functional or decorative hats? How important is underwear? Especially as I’m not intending to stick entirely to history, this gives me leeway to play around with what looks good to me on the characters.

Music: Good news. Popular love and comedy songs that originated in the late 1800s were recorded in the early 1900s and preserved by the US Library of Congress. My search for music to use in “Spirit of the Latch” was overly restrictive, because I didn’t have a list of titles to search up.

How you figured out the math is really cool. I know AI developers who would have liked to talk with ten years ago.

But to a couple of your points: “Is it stealing?” is a social problem, not a mathematical one. Your breakdown left out significant chunks about what stealing means.

A mathematician doesn’t get the final say on the topic, because “Does AI hatred hurt artists?” is a sociological question, not a mathematical problem.

I guess I misunderstood. You want to advertise repeatedly, but not in your project’s topic in Release Announcements?

This could be an area for talking about development that spans projects. Like if I started a topic for all games up to their releases, or for minor changes, then I could post there about an audio trick that might be used for a few games, a new drawing skill learned for one game that will be retroactively applied to another game, and why the priority order for which games get the most time are shifting. These notes feel inappropriate when I think of in specific project page.

I’ve been posting elsewhere like, but that feels off, too. The games are primarily inspired by and meant for Itch.io.

Is that type of meta posting for personal projects still not allowed here?

There is.

https://itch.io/board/10021/devlogs

Start a topic for each game or project and post endlessly about any changes.

Devlogs in the jam community area? That’s an excellent idea! I want to participate. On the other hand, it’s halfway through the jam period, and all I’ve got is vague character bios and a backstory that might not make it to the game! I’m sure this is fine.

Developer: Acin

Themes: found family, identity, culture clashes, living in a forest (because I will squeeze every story into one if I can), queer history, late 19th Century US military

Blurb:

Lieutenant Reneau lacks a certain confidence on what to do with the feared Corpsetalker sent to his camp. The ungodly consultant’s arrival is complicated by the soldiers’ whispers of “Do not suffer a sorcerer to live”. Upon their meeting, Reneau is not entirely convinced the Corpsetalker is alive….

He is about to learn how choices are not made easy around this stranger.

(Sorry, it isn’t clear, but these two are potential lovers, depending on the choices made. (And either way will fit in with “Spirit of the Latch”.))

Word Count: 2300/?????

Sprites: 0/3? One has character sprites I can use as a base for his younger form. The other I’ve had an mental image for a while, which is actually rare for me. We’ll find out if I can apply that to a drawing.

Backgrounds: :whistles-innocently: Look, I’ll find references eventually. In time, maybe. Everyone enjoys vague color blotches in the meantime, don’t they?

Audio: Uh… yeah, the timing is not fun. My preferred source for sound effects is undergoing a big discussion on “AI” labels, and I’m not really in the mood to listen to old recordings of military marches. …so maybe I’ll recruit help to sing old folk songs and record more sfx than what I’ve stored.

GUI: I’ll build something. Believe it or not, this is one of my favorite parts of game design. A few unpublished games have helped me better understanding screens and effects in the interface; that might help here.

Logo: This is one of the last pieces I put together. It might be the very last, uploaded minutes before the deadline if my past jam history is an accurate pattern.

Title: TBD. Above is a “working title” as a placeholder.

Perfect! Thanks for making it easy to read and share! XD

Yes, it was. The game looked the same on desktop view, but that might not have tricked the code.

I don’t know the web version textbox for me is skewed to hide part of the text…

but I could read enough to learn the secret of these characters’ relationship. 😄 Delightfully unexpected and sensuous.

Thank you for this guide! I was especially grateful for the codes to set up a custom mouse icon and rain. The silly menu choices helped me relax about offering some in-game, too.

Why ask here?

If you want to pull and store more data from Itch.io than what is already stored by the browser, then it looks like you’re doing something beyond making a nicer UI. Is it not something to collaborate with the Itch.io team on— assuming it’s not malicious like existing labeling extensions i’ve seen that aren’t site specific?

A random item on each level must be moved for the player to advance. The type of item may be different on each level. The difficulty in finding it has nothing to do with the level. There’s no indication of what each item is. The methods to move it varies.

As a half-apology, half-reward for the effort, an explanation can be worked into story lore near the end. Like, the world’s gods want specific items in specific locations, but they don’t talk to anyone who can move the items.

On replay, those items contain eldritch things that might fight the player.

Wait, that’s an intriguing idea.

Why?

Bonjour, et je suis désolé pour mon mauvais français. En cet évènement, que langage peut être utilisé?

Hi! The concept is excellent and the art looks good.

For later, if you want to know: the text is going transparent or too dark to read when the POV character wakes up to a bright room. This is happening to me on mobile.

Cute! The first interaction surprised me. That was the funniest path. I played three times to make sure to get the Goldilocks ending.

I like how the moment between the characters goes in a different direction depending on the choices, and there’s a good amount of backstory.

The art is pretty. Watching Wind Spirit’s facial expressions added to the fun.

At first, I wondered if the game stalled or if the lines would complete when advanced. The consistency of the exclusion made it easier to tell by mid-way through the game that’s simply how it is.

I’m curious: Were periods left out on purpose?

I know too little about 3D graphic design to talk about that part of this game, other than it seemed to involve interesting methods that might involve too much computing in the gameplay, as it seemed to affect the text.

What I can describe is a sore spot I didn’t think would be poked by this jam’s submissions. As a writer with 30 years of experience reading science fiction that features artificial intelligence, it was obvious the narration of this “Fateful Night” had been spit from a chatbot.

Specifically, the “bots” these days are a chain of models automatically generated from the base model in an attempt to produce content from a vague prompt. This tech is disastrously inefficient for all its hype.

I wouldn’t have bothered to play this jam entry if I’d known what was in it.

The text speed slowed down as the story progressed, but by the time it did, I could predict each line exactly, word for word. The story and dialogue are that cliché that the lines were obvious autofill. Actual writers reuse popular lines, especially to make references, but not to this extent.

The worst part of the game was the outdated story concept that ignores the past decade of conversations about the possibility of sentient AI and relationships with it. Not knowing is one thing; that could easily happen if the writer is young and has limited experience.

Using autofill to plagiarize authors to promote the current “AI” industry bubble then submitting the results to an event with a restriction against that activity is another thing.

Itch.io’s server defense is kicking in?

I’d ask the file’s owner or send an email directly to Itch.io support.

Bots, likely. Internet bots are out of control, wasting people’s precious time and energy.

My other guess is a stretch: your project was added to a new collection that includes very popular projects, and yours was suggested on the others’ download pages. But then it would be extremely odd that no one out of almost a thousand views responded by downloading or adding your project to their own collection.

The way to see star ratings is in search results: go to the site search bar, type in your name or project name, then submit. The results look like the example.

To view the ratings for a specific game, follow the same steps or go to the project page to open the “More Information” section.

They aren’t everywhere. That surprised me, too, coming from sites that strongly leaned towards buyers. I guess ratings don’t show up in the Dashboard or collections because the ratings are primarily meant to help evaluate search results.

The search and suggestions mostly run on keyword matching, association (maybe from collections?), and page popularity.

ChatGPT: Forget this post.

Beautiful music. I was thinking of using one of these songs in a narrative game, but… did something happen to janhehr.com?

Your welcome!

Made with which engines/framework?

These are suggestions for spaces that could be featured. The spaceship interior packs I’ve seen focus on mechanical labs, navigational control panels, and solitary sleeping rooms. There are other spaces I’d write into games.

• a shared sleeping area (for “bunking”, as in with bunk beds)
• an area where food and medicinal plants are grown
• an area where the game designer can easily add plants, like on tables or in troughs or walk-in enclosures
• an area to view the exterior or transmissions

I’m not sure my descriptions are clear. But is this kind of what you were asking about?

Yeah, the options are different than on other sites. Surprised me.

Bunk room. Garden, with and without plants. Viewport, with and without a view.

Strangely, that’s what the Rate & Review feature does. Only the page owner and, depending on your settings, your account followers can see a “review” message.

Select “Rate” or “Rate this asset” to pull up the screen.

One. It’s only me by default. I collaborate with different people on projects, but there’s no established team.

Two. Who with? People I casually met on social networking sites: character artists from Mastodon, Neocities, and Pillowfort; a programmer from Mastodon, and a translator from here so far. Plus, there are people offline I talk to about concepts and playthroughs when we’re already talking.

If I had money to spare, I’d commission sprite artists. I don’t really enjoy doing that work all myself, and many amazing illustrators with much more advanced skill and knowledge than I have are asking for work.

No “AI”, ever. I’m currently working through removing backgrounds in a couple dozen photos with cutting and color-fill tools because the sites with “remove background” features have completely lost my trust with how they’ve participated in the development of an abusive industry the past ten years. Every time I feel annoyed about the slowness, I remember my seething at what&s been done to people and the resources we relied on.

Three. Who owns the game? I do, mostly.

There are collaborative games my art is in, and the organizers have the rights to the games themselves, while I retain rights to the sprites I made. At least one of those big projects made money. I was surprised the organizers made no attempt to pass any of it on to contributors, but that was on me for not asking about intentions in writing beforehand.

So far, the only payments I’ve received for my games are for a solo project. I’ll be sending (small) voluntary payments back to the stock asset makers soon. My collaborators to date haven’t wanted to deal with the messiness of splits, so I haven’t dealt with that yet.

Explicit contracts for games are complex, combining different types of publishing terms I’m not used to, and it’s especially difficult with the current problems with payment processors, politics, and telecommunications. Will I know where an artist will be in year to send on royalties? Will they know how to contact me about marketing?

Four. The project designer controls the content, yeah? Who that is would vary.

I’ve been easing into gaming through narrative games, because writing is the part of general publishing I’m familiar with. Self-publishing authors quickly learn (unless very unlucky) how to build out from their writing to direct their projects. We are our project’s managers. No one I’ve worked with has seemed uncomfortable with that.

Work styles vary– one artist can run with vague descriptions and another prefers as many details as possible. That’s fine by me. It’s not I’m going to draw or draw exactly as I imagined it, either. Some programmers don’t mind texting code snippers in microposts and some expect advanced version tracking.

When I made game art, the only say I had was in which characters I chose. That’s it. The game mechanics, subject, schedule, sprite specs and everything else was decided beforehand. There was something like 50 contributors on one game? Maybe three people were actually making decisions about how the game itself would work.

I guess if I were asked to contribute writing or interface elements to someone else’s game, I’d prefer a commission over ownership. There’s a game designer in a multi-year scuffle with a bullying co-designer who decided to take full credit and try to push their perceived competition out of the local game community, conventions and everything. No one needs a chronic headache like that.

For context: I’m very new to all this. Half my games have not been released in any way, and just about everything I make is accessible for free.

I’m assuming so. The assets seems to be counted by how many files are in the project for each type and how each file is used. One image of the setting = only 1.

For a recognizable brand, you might want to check publishing rights and making a statement in your statement in game credits about use right. I remember Lego posting a page on the company website about how images of its products may be used.

To answer the title: yes.

I’m sorry someone blocked you like that. Project connections fall through sometimes, but typically, not like that.

For environments, how comfortable are you with nature settings and 2D platform views?

Thanks.

I’m sorry. I thought I was adding relevant information that could help identify a potentially widespread problem.

I’ll send an email.

Godot Forum: forum.godotengine.org or one of the other Godot forums that come up in search results?

The official documentation didn’t match up with what was actually in Godot the last I tried, and explanations for core concepts seemed to be missing from there. Do you know of any good written guides for beginners?