itch.io

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.)

Sophie looks too young for my tastes.

The setting is too plain and generic.

The screenshots have good variety.

You might want to post photos or a tagline so Community goers know what to expect before clicking through.

I have an idea of what a “Tumblr sexyman” is only because younger people brought up The Once-ler in a social media conversation about censorship. I’m… no less confused after passing the F.F.A.R.T.

I was questioning if “modern tools” meant that. Thanks for the warning.

Personally, I feel it’s overly generous to allow most of the modern types of AI in games, books, and assets. “Assisted” is a euphemism. The wording doesn’t need to be that soft. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near as accommodating to the slop on the site -or- to excuses about world-destroying chatbots if it were my decision.

There are too few spaces left that put up any type of resistance to the destruction and corruption happening.

But anyhow, it’s not my decision, Leafo is making an effort at nuance, and the OP is only trying to communicate clearly and accurately.

My thought is that if people are wondering how a game here was made, they’ll read the project description first. Just make a note in the description. Devlogs help with longer descriptions about the development process.

This site doesn’t have the same culture as Steam, where the focus is on popularity and profit.

Itch.io users read casual devlogs.

And back to my first point, there is more detail in the dashboard disclosure than the yes / no question, and the detail is available to players who want to dig for it.

Click the box, then there’s a dropdown section for specifity.

What kind of AI generated content is used? Classification of AI-Generated content is mandatory. Your classification will be used to add additional filtering tags to your project.

Graphics

Sounds

Text & Dialog

Code

The new line in the “More information” section on project pages shows the detail.

Per the official guidelines I remembered reading from wherever it’s buried on the site, publishers are supposed to note how this type of AI was used.

The ToS is an agreement between the site user and itch.io and does not extend off-site to other users.

Devs who join a bundle to collect buyer contact info are being sleazy.

Thanks!

I can think of uses for this.

But what’s a “DENO”? I’m not sure if that’s a type of personal phrasing.

I’d also need a clear privacy policy and some type of positive reputation of the developer before allowing access to a phone’s camera hardware. There’s too much potential for abuse.

I’ve been enjoying the new field on project pages the past few days. I open the details box on nearly every page I visit— would be nice if we could select to have that open by default, by the way— and the link on no-ai projects is appreciated. That link is reassuring, because it means more to me than the AI-generated links do.

Without the no-ai link, old pages where the box wasn’t selected would be indistinguishable from projects where the No button was selected. We’d have to guess by the date of the last update. I don’t know or remember when the box was added for developers. Then there also wouldn’t be an easy link to see more no-ai projects.

It would feel like AI-using projects would be promoted— favored by itch.io— when developer- or team-made-only projects aren’t.

The AI stuff is supposed to be noted in the project descriptions, anyway. It often isn’t. When it’s there, the link under details is redundant to me. When there’s no mention in the description, I’m looking for the no-ai tag in details.

A definite no from me then.

No one who’s paid any attention the past few years trusts bitcoin.

The terms of a contract don’t really matter if there’s not trust between the two parties.

But I’m curious. What’s “an open source smart” contract? That’s looks like a phrase a machine spit out.

Thank you. I’ll consider starting a troubleshooting topic.

I asked around elsewhere (to clarify: it’s new to me) and was told Butler wasn’t working. That was why I was surprised it is.

At this point, I’d like a thorough breakdown of how Butler is supposed to work, like what it’s meant to do and how the devices communicate. Is it the same as it was two years ago?

Asking what each error means doesn’t sound worthwhile, because I don’t have trust in the process at this point.

Forty percent (13/30) plays per view is a pretty good response.

When first putting out games, I think it helps to know that the percentage of page visitors who play the game drops when the view count spikes.

Most visitors seem to click out of curiosity and move after reading descriptions.

I’ve been around too long to put any trust a gaming site that isn’t gamer-owned and -moderated. The same goes for other crafts sites. That was one of the factors that weighed into my joining itch.io. Leafo makes games that are on this site.

This didn’t format correctly when posting. But I guess if someone tolerates what comes out of AI, then should be acceptable. At least it doesn’t share stolen words or pictures of people’s kids.

Environmental concerns. Examples: • https://wisconsinwatch.org/2026/03/wisconsin-data-center-water-olympic-swimming-pools-microsoft-mount-pleasant-racine/ • https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-data-center-emissions-environment-b2887454.html • https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/04/pfas-pollution-data-centers-ai • https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/ai-data-centers-energy-demands/686064/ (if you have a public library, it might have a subscription you can use)

Economic concerns (& anger) — https://www.npr.org/2025/11/23/nx-s1-5615410/ai-bubble-nvidia-openai-revenue-bust-data-centers — https://fortune.com/2026/03/19/ai-memory-chip-shortage-hbm-economy/

Job frustrations (mass layoffs, management forcing slopware on employees, corrupted data, hardware failures from the AI acting as malware, growing communication gaps). Political alarm (the AI industry is bolstering the rise in fascism by interfering in democratic processes and civil rights). Ethics. Fatigue with the slop. Personal costs to deal with DDoS attacks and accidental code that affects hardware. Distrust and anger from unauthorized scraping for training datasets.

Off-topic: vibe coding brings to my mind a programmer or web designer in the zone while typing away at code. That’s a near opposite of what an LLM-style prompter does. There’s no “vibe” in machine output.

Shifting to the topic: It’s sad that the parameters were regurgitated from somewhere (a gaming subreddit, StackOverflow, a blog, or private notes) and not your from your preferences based on experience. I would like to know who made the originak list(s). Because me and that person or group have shared interests.

Anyhow! You could use those parameters if you’re interested in the challenge of them. It wouldn’t make sense for anyone to pay a new site full of beginner projects, especially with the oligarchical tech corporations squeezing indie creators.

But learning new things is good.

None of us know what will be useful years from now. Whatever you know can be applied. It’s like how knowing how to do math in your head means simply doing math mentally, not bothering to look around for a calculator and note space every time.

To get started in actually learning to code, I recommend choosing a language that’s associated with small project files, like HTML/CSS or Visual Basic.

Then choice one of the developer training sites (for the beginner’s lessons) and a beginner-level guidebook for that language. Follow the instructions.

Pixel art is tiny in size and enduringly popular for arcade-style games. You can find art, artists, or drawing programs for game art. Otherwise, you’ll need to compress large image files, removing unneeded colors and other data.

Images and audio take up the bulk of project sizes. For music—

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune

Just… yeah, do the work.

If you want to pay devs to make games, that would be good, too.

Yes.

I don’t know how to answer the question in the title, but for knowing about interest— Creator Dashboard > Analytics shows where your page visitors came from (when referral tracking is allowed) and that area shows if any have played, downloaded, or added your game to a collection.