itch.io

Unfortunately when you talk about "avoiding risk and controversy", it immediately calls up a gamergate-like association. I'm not sure if that's what you're getting at and yes, it is stupid when people ruin things for everyone else. But then again, you don't really explain what you actually mean by "risk taking" "raw and real" "anything that might offend." So I am left to guess what that means.

As a musician who is also a bit of a videogame soundtrack nerd (I would unironically listen to Jazz Jackrabbit in the car)... yes, I would still try the game. Some games are fine, or even better without music. I guess if I was playing and the whole time kept thinking to myself "I wish there was a soundtrack", then the game might feel unfinished.

I'd say that if you're leaving out the music then make sure the rest of the audio design does a good job of filling the space, as you probably should avoid complete silence most of the time. Music helps with that since even when nothing is happening in the game, there's some audio going. Just having some very ambient thing going on, that people argue if it even counts as music, will help to ensure that it's never completely silent. From a sound design perspective, complete silence is almost always a bad thing. It's especially jarring to your ears if you are on headphones and go from silence, to a somewhat loud sound, or vice versa. You may have experienced a "rumbling" in your ears if you've ever done this (listening to loud music and you suddenly pull out the cord), because our hearing is relative, and always trying to adjust to the overall volume. This is why in professional music production there's almost always some amount of sound throughout the song, even if it drops to very quiet it will never be completely silent (well, almost never).

Now despite being a music nerd who will listen to the OST even when it's kinda bad, I have also had some experiences where I enjoyed no-music gaming. A great example would be Abuse... I always played this game without music! It actually does have a soundtrack but I either couldn't get it to work or had a version where it was missing. Now when I look at gameplay videos where the music is working, it just sounds cheesy to me. To me this game is actually better without the music because the sound design together with the grungy visuals creates the perfect atmosphere. Of course I'm biased since I always played it without music and therefore when I hear the music my brain is like, what? Anyway my point is, you should feel free to not include bumpin' tracks in your game if that's going to achieve the atmosphere that you want.

I don't think what you are doing would count as "generated content." What you are doing is similar to copying a few code snippets from tutorials.

Now if you were having an LLM spit out artwork, audio, levels, and other assets that you simply plop into your game, then you would need the tag.

From https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#accurately-tag-your-use-of-gene...:

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that create new content (text, images, music) by learning from large datasets. This includes large language models like ChatGPT and image generation models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion that create new outputs based on training data. 

We ask that you accurately tag your project if it contains materials produced by generative AI by utilizing the AI Disclosure section on your project’s edit page.

They don't even mention code here, and it's not like you are generating pages of code anyway, so I think you should NOT use the tag.

 I'm not gonna sell games for children on a website like this.

Well itch isn't a kid-safe website. Even with NSFW content off, there's still plenty of material that would be inappropriate for children. For example a game or story discussing suicide would be safe-for-work, but too mature for young kids. 

It isn't your job to prevent children from navigating to itch.io. Theoretically your game would also be available in other places, which might have more filtering or restrictions. Really, it should be the kid's parents that are monitoring what they browse and download anyway. If anyone complained that their kid went from your game page to itch.io, then disabled the NSFW filter, then clicked on something... well that's an example of a stupid parent.

Wow big necro... I think one of the reasons they are reluctant about a PM system is that it can open the door to harassment/scamming/other unwanted contact. Right now everything users do on here is public, except for reviews I guess (but those can only be done once per game I assume?). That makes it easier for moderation purposes.

Still, I would prefer to have the ability to direct message, so that I could contact people without them having to provide an email address, discord name, etc. (And without having to post on some random page of theirs where what I want to say isn't exactly relevant to the page itself)

plops

I meant "edna23roe"... sounds like an AI response. And its got a link to Maryland EZpass. wtf?

I don't think horse racing, just as a general concept, is something you'll have an easy time selling. Personally I would not even play a free game about horse racing unless it had something -really- special in terms of gameplay... just rolling dice is not enough. In this game it also seems like there's no way for the player to influence the game or to interact with opponents, in which case it might as well be a slot machine. 

The cover image is silly, but the background being your decapitated head logo makes no sense at all for the style of the game. Just having a logo like that is going to put off anyone looking for family-friendly content. You also tagged the game with "Animals"... yeah, probably not going to get many fans out of that tag, if you catch my meaning?

Are you a bot?

Hmm... honestly that makes it seem even more like the CRT filter is the focus. It's really not a big deal since the description side is "unfiltered" and besides being written in the font itself, includes a mockup as well (selectable, neat!). I was thinking more along the lines of just including at least some of the plain example images as seen here

Frickin' beautiful...  the mockups really sell it too. Although I really don't like the CRT effect on the project page, to me it takes away from appreciating the font itself and doesn't look consistent with other parts of the page.

I definitely feel you on getting stuck on a problem and giving up on the whole project because of it, and yes when you finally break through it's very satisfying. I did a similar thing to what you described with a project where I realized the basic player movement was just not that much fun, it was cool in theory but too complex and annoying for what I wanted to create (an easy to pick up arcade game). Instead of reworking it, I just moved on to other projects. Finally after like a year, I had this realization that if I didn't go back to finish my half-completed projects NOW then I would never do it. So I jumped back in to this game and totally changed the way it controls.... then still didn't like it and changed it again and finally am satisfied with it. Funny thing is, the most simple and straightforward method was the one that worked for me. It was definitely a "why didn't I do this in the first place" moment. But hey that's how we learn!

thanks for spraying

Well I downloaded revolution irc on my phone, can't get it to connect to anything 😔 

Interesting... well no offence to your testers but they must not be very experienced players. This is easier than most of the original Doom 2 maps! And the modern "meta" is far beyond that level. That's not to say that you can't make easy maps, and in fact I appreciate when people don't try to push the envelope all the time and just let you cruise for a minute (especially in a large set of maps).

The difficulty settings are found in the properties of Things, you should have some checkboxes that say "Easy" "Medium" "Hard" etc. When you select a difficulty level in the game, only Things that have that specific box checked will spawn. I'm too young and Hurt me plenty spawn "Easy" items. Hurt me plenty is "Medium" and then UV and Nightmare are "Hard". This applies to all things! Most commonly you would have more and tougher monsters as you go up. But you can also have different amounts of ammo, weapons... even different placements for keys, teleporter destinations, and obstacles if you want to get creative. But as a beginner mapper you would probably want to focus on the balance between monsters, health, and ammo.

Difficulty settings are not mandatory but they do make your maps more polished, and allow a wider range of players to hit that sweet spot of challenging but not impossible. There's a nice page with more detail about difficulty settings here:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Skill_level

Pretty fun map with a decent amount of areas for a speedmap, which I prefer over details. It is too easy though, so much resources are given to the player with not enough opposition. The dark spectre room would have been harder if I couldn't just spam plasma, while tanking hits with my blue armor.

There are a couple small errors such as nukage floor that doesn't hurt you, and one sliver of wall that you can see through, but overall nothing majorly broken. Texturing could use work as well but again, I care more about fun gameplay than perfect bricks. And it was definitely fun, just needs the heat turned up and the ammo turned down. One thing to keep in mind is that Plasma ammo pickups give you a lot. Plasma box gives you 100 ammo which is 1/3 of your maximum... on the other hand rocket box only gives you 5 when you can hold 50. In other words you need 10 box of rockets vs 3 box of cells to be full... and everything just ~melts~ to plasma.

I wasn't sure if jumping was supposed to be allowed so I completed the map without jumping. I didn't find the secret, literally had to no-clip to find it and then felt stupid :) 

In regard to "it's all been said before/not adding anything"... first of all every human and life is different from the next and nobody else can tell YOUR story. And second, even if things have been said before, so what? Why not say it again? Some people will not even know about whatever it is you think you're copying or echoing... for them it might even be the first time hearing about the topic. You might reach people your predecessors have not. I don't read a ton of zines and so to me yours is very unique. Something to think about ^.^

It just wouldn't be cost effective. You need infrastructure specifically built for streaming video. Also, moderating video content is an immense task...

Oh, that isn't my website. It was made by Sadness, who also created www.yesterweb.org. Unfortunately things there got out of control and she had to step away from webmastering, but at least some of the resources are still there.

The rest of the internet is still there (try Neocities and Nekoweb for an easy change of scenery). Remember, we used to have to search for websites. Google and many other engines try really hard to steer you toward products... go for alternatives such as the ones listed at the bottom of this page:

https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/cyberspace/surf-the-web

That isn't really the point of the original post which was mainly addressing privacy concerns. I totally understand the feeling of being pulled toward whatever has the biggest audience, especially if you are trying to make a living. But I think the struggle to monetize every corner of our internet lives is actually part of the problem (discord or any other service would not bother doing shady stuff without an incentive). You can still be a developer and want to chat with people without it being a brand mission.

<3

Wow. I haven't played ZZT in YEARS

10 days is not enough...

People can play your game without logging in to an itch.io account, so you would have to provide a way to manually enter a username anyway. I don't see much of a benefit from this unless you're trying to push people into creating an itch account. And that just seems antithetical to the vibe of itch, the one place where people are NOT treated like a commodity...

Revealing your age online is stupid, until you are in your 30s. Whatever steps you need to take in order to publish, you should be able to accomplish them without screaming from the rooftops about how young you are.

Your "understanding" of women says it all

Power consumption is more of a concern when using company servers that you don't control, I agree that using a model locally on your own machine would be (probably) harmless. And by the same logic, training it on only data that you own should also be harmless.

In regard to tagging though, I would suspect that Itch wants to keep things as simple as possible. If you really need a disclaimer then you can add it to your page, each developer can be as specific as they want about their process. 

On the other hand you are not purchasing storage space either. I think as long as you were reasonably able to download the things you paid for, then Itch has fulfilled their end of the bargain.

Think of it this way, if you paid for something at a physical store and then forgot to bring it home, you should be able to go back and get it within a reasonable time frame. But if the store closes down 6 months from now and you still haven't retrieved your item, it's really your own fault and it is unlikely that you will get your item even with court involvement.

Similarly, you cannot expect Itch servers to exist forever. You should be downloading things as you purchase them and preserving them on your own hard drives which you can easily have multiples of for security. 

Why does the quality of the end result matter? For those of us who want to support developers who refrain from using AI, the end result is irrelevant. It is the process itself that is in question. Your example is kind of like saying "Yeah I know they steal their cars, but they do a really good job of fixing them up afterward." Or, "I know this company pollutes the environment, but I like their burgers." 

You can comment on their game page. No need to necro such an old thread with off-topic comment :/

I don't see what is relevant about using resources made by others, with permission of course. I even pay for them sometimes. But artists or coders or anyone else who has had their work flushed down a digital toilet have -zero- chance of getting paid, or even recognized. The reason is that what comes out the other side is akin to a sewer pipe dumping the whole mix as one homogenized stew.

Now if people want to train on their own datasets that's fine. To be honest, I feel that this might be a self-correcting problem... or perhaps, not a problem in the first place. There's a lot of talk about how "this changes everything", but so far nothing really innovative has come out of it. Will it ever?

The workload is the least problematic aspect of AI. Although, I do think this could become a major problem... what if we get to a point where you don't need to learn much about principles of game development? I agree that current technology isn't there yet, but if eventually you can generate entire games using a few prompts, then your "it still takes effort" angle will disappear. You will succumb to your own justification as your potential customers decide more and more to simply generate their own game instead...

Anyway, the main issues right now, at least in my opinion, are leeching off other people's work, and depletion of real-world resources. And although the reduced workload isn't my first line of attack, it does still bother me a little bit. It comes off as lazy. I don't agree with you that "you have to understand and learn its mechanics." Unless you can program your own AI, you don't understand the mechanics. All you understand is that if you type in something different, you'll get a different result. It's like saying that someone who knows how to hit the gas and break pedals and turn the steering wheel, understands the mechanics of a vehicle. But all they actually need to understand is the interface. 

It is not obvious. If it were, it would be forbidden from day one, everywhere.

You are putting way too much faith in governing bodies. In reality, governments often need significant pressure before ruling on something "obvious" 

I've been using GDevelop, one nice thing about it is the exported project can run without WebGL 2.

Itch is not platform specific so you can have an embedded HTML5 game, as well as downloads for PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, C64, gameboy, pretty much anything

are you sure it doesn't say that you need to declare whether it has AI or not?

Doesn't seem like a fail at all for your first game. The one mistake you didn't make was to never finish the game and just endlessly move on to new projects without releasing them :P

Many of those free games include an option to donate, so there is still a bit of revenue coming in there. I'd be curious to know how many games are actually free with no donation option, although that section probably also includes the highest percentage of unfinished or extremely low quality content (and therefore not much bandwidth usage)

I don't haha, that's why I said "note to self"... I used to just use mIRC. I think I used kiwiIRC for in-browser at one time but right now the site seems to be down.

What about good old IRC

There are several mobile IRC apps around, not to mention embedded chats on websites that work just as well if you don't want to download an app.

"The thing is, Discord is a place where most people are. "
^ This is sort of the lynchpin of the entire Web2.0 exodus. The herd mentality is strong. But, to break out of it someone has to be first. You can't start a community by just expecting it to already be there when you arrive. I think the best strategy would be to start small, find a couple friends who also don't like Discord and get a small chat going. Then share your (hopefully positive) experience with others. People need to be shown an alternative, just saying "Discord bad" won't change much at all. Also telling people about an alternative is not as good as actually using and promoting that alternative (note to self lol)