This is crazy intriguing. I have been making a custom 360-degree system pretty much from scratch in Unity with inverted spheres over time for some projects in development but it looks like this may work really well as a possible alternative option and might turn out to be more intuitive for this specific type of thing.
I'll be sending a little bit of cash your way as support as I simply can't ignore the potential I see here.
-Matthew Hornbostel
Infuriating but at times also hilarious. What the heck is going on here... love it. hate it. But it's making me suspicious of the trees around my house. I keep glancing at them and giving them side eye when I walk outside just in case they try something.
(8-O
Matthew H, Game Asset Creator
Have you played Chants of Sennaar? Because the puzzle mechanic of translating unknown language terms is VERY similar in some ways to your basic puzzle solving concept. I can see this game as that idea merged with the mystery elements you mentioned (Obra Dinn, etc) and it makes for a fantastic hybrid of puzzle structure and narrative mystery. I think the mixture you used in this game works really well.
I'm also super impressed that somehow you did this in 72 hours. I suck at game jams. My problem's always seemingly endless delays due to feature creep and too many projects I'm rotating between. And at some point I just need to accept that an actual released project is better than a bigger, more ambitious and polished, but never finished thing.
I mean, I have gotten some stuff out there, but mostly just low priced game asset packs at this point. I've got 5000+ asset files released across 12+ packs by now. And they're increasingly well reviewed and well liked but I do need to move forward faster on actual game dev. Because the actual game projects I have on my itch.io page are mostly barely moving lately.
Furniture and Interiors pack, one of the showcase renders.
Upcoming horror model pack, early example render. Arrives in next few days.
Marshes and meadows renders, example scenes using a few ground details from those packs.
Have a lot of released asset packs + some stuff still in development. Usually I do a pretty weak job showing what I have, particularly in the texture sets, but my focus has usually been on simply creating massive archives of PBR textures, 3d models, etc and actually making good scenes displaying every single item would make the process even more time consuming.
It's why this stuff never ended up in Unity asset store. They ask for a specific scene arrangement of every item with each labeled and when that usually means labeling 500+ texture maps individually it feels like a waste of my time. I can process, make seamless at least another 30, 40 of those textures from my own photography backlog in the time they ask for just to organize them all in a very particular way. And I prefer to be creative with my time.
https://matthornb.itch.io/ - texture packs and 3d assets all bundled together for under $2 during holiday sale events.
Ko-fi.com/matthornb/ - comission for more specific 3d stuff on the cheap but simple comments, requests for 3d things added on itch also sometimes work out too just way slower.
Paid games on itch only rarely have high levels of visibility even when extremely well made.
Free game with optional tipping or a longer paid version connected as optional upgrade (upsell) might succeed if it is good enough.
Horror is dominant here especially freeware horror. That's why I am working on a horror asset pack - knowing the itch community has a seemingly insatiable demand for that type of material.
Retro PSX 3d style is common, which is an aesthetic choice but maybe also is just a way to limit texture filesize and ensure things run in a browser window given the severity of WebGL technical constraints. Browser games are often hits here.
There are visual novels, often sexual, and quirky experimental projects of a few types scattered around but horror seems to be by far the most common category of successful material.
My sense is just do the sort of project you have a passion and vision for though, as that is more likely to get finished. Who knows, the game idea you have might be a hit precisely because it stands out as unexpected and different from the rest of the material on the platform. If you aim for commercially successful, and make a by the numbers game, you miss the reality that the weirdest games doing their own oddball unusual thing often are among gaming's biggest hits.
Many game devs over the years have made massive hits they didn't even realize would be huge. They just felt the thing they were doing was too intrinsically promising not to try it. Think Portal in '07. They had a great mechanic sure but it lent itself to puzzle solving and platforming, hybridizing two genres that were both fading painfully by '07. Valve made the thing anyway because they wanted to, and could - and hedged their bets on it by sticking it as a bonus in the Orange Box. It was an afterthought until it launched, at which point it blindsided everyone by being wildly successful. It's like the film biz, nobody really has a particularly good clue what will actually succeed until it does. Star Wars being the classic example, it was a scifi movie and that alone made everybody in the studio ignore it. Scifi was generally thought of as a genre with limited audience potential. Star Wars did something with it nobody at all saw coming, the studio execs included. Myst was financed in a year (1991) when the most successful CD in the world was a digital encyclopedia with 80,000 copies made and sold. But a few small developers, saw the potential of the format and couldn't resist so in '93 Trilobyte launches The 7th Guest and soon after Cyan releases Myst and both shatter expectations, sell over a million copies. Myst specifically tops annual PC sales charts four years in a row by doing something almost nobody else had been actively trying to do. It held the all time PC game sales record up til 2002 when The Sims broke it, and that game was also its own weird thing very unlike what other developers had been doing, the core idea emerged from Will Wright watching children playing with a dollhouse. That guy was often finding ideas from oddball sources. Simcity, his first hit, was the result of an urban planning course in university and he was excited about the idea for the game and nobody else got it. Like, it seemed to be such a boring subject, but he had this idea that wound up being one of the earliest examples, maybe first of the entire city builder / economic management category in gaming.
Sometimes a USP matters. Unique selling proposition. The specific thing your game is doing that nobody else is doing. The thing that makes it a special twist on its existing category. A strong special standout element that makes your game different + strong execution + capable promotion doesn't guarantee a hit but does massively boost odds I think.
Sometimes it is good to see a USP as elevator pitch you can convey quickly. "This, but that." 2025 indie success Blue Prince for example: Roguelite + mysterious puzzle game. Two things normally not combined, and some may argue they did not gel that well but the fact that it was doing something weirdly different from traditional puzzle adventure titles can't have been too bad for its visibility.
Thing people recognize but with a twist on it somewhere, that makes it stand out as interesting. Can be as simple as an art style others would not choose. I have games in two genres slowly moving forward that use scale miniature photography as the aesthetic. The core concept is fairly established but the look makes the thing unexpected in relation to otherwise similar work. Find your own creative spin and do something cool.
Don't feel the need to chase popular trends. Be ready to try something other people are not yet considering.
It might fail hard sure, but might also be huge precisely by attaining novelty.
"The smart person hits a target that is hard to hit. The genius hits a target nobody else even realizes can exist." I don't recall where the quote came from but it sure stuck with me.
Matthew H.
Age 39 here. So a really old guy by this group's standards.
Lots of missteps over many years, tons of dead ends and finally seeing that changing a bit lately.
Making a ton of asset packs and quietly have gamedev stuff moving forward in the background. Had eBay, Etsy art shops / printing services for a while but those exploded so big, after a while it was impossible to keep up with demand and I had no good way to scale up so just abandoned all of that. Now trying digital product sales and it seems to be working better.
I mean, the 'starving artist' is a long-standing cliche for good reason. I doubt it would be that hard to find hundreds of artists here prepared to work for almost nothing. Some will even do it purely for the exposure if the core game idea you pitch is really promising.
A lot of people love making art of some sort but the market for that work is crowded so wages are low and only exceptional work goes anywhere in career terms. With AI in the mix it is only getting worse lately.
I have a comissions area on Ko-fi and charge really low amounts, like well below minimum wage, and for members it gets basically near $1/hr in effect.
Of course, actually linking to that page on itch will result in automated warning and suspicion of 'malware' as with any recent link going out from the site, due to scammers abusing this site and community lately.
It is Ko-fi and username matthornb. All I can say on that. I also have a ton of itch asset collections and those are beginning to take off.
https://matthornb.itch.io - and as with the commissions I have on Ko-fi the pricing drops to ridiculously low levels at times. Even more so. 5000+ asset files, years of work often gets bundled there for about $1.50. The good news is it is somehow working out well anyway. The gamedev community circa 2026 is quite big, there are likely a few million active gamedevs out there so if even 1% of the world's indie developers discovered I exist and found my work of value it would be a massive, gigantic success in my view. Already have made 200+ sales so it is starting to work.
Indie gamedev is risky and rarely pays the bills - just over 82% of indie dev projects make below minimum wage once released given the time invested - but asset creation is slightly less so (maybe). You are selling shovels in a gold rush basically - the people searching for indie gold have terrible odds and the people selling tools maybe not much better but it is at the very least a way to diversify product lines and asset collections can be completed really well in weeks or months, not years like a really well made indie game.
I see where I am, living costs pared back heavily, no car, no rent, just hanging out in a little home in a walkable town. I can live on below $10k/year. So in my view minimum wage isn't necessary, I can hit below half that for work done and be fine, but if something takes off I can just save a little but mostly just donate a lot. I look at the sales of Steam games and realize I only need to be above the bottom 25% of Steam releases and I will be able to justify continuing game creation so I am lucky in that sense. I can live doing work I actually enjoy the process of and many people cannot say that. I'll never thrive exactly doing this but that is fine. Accumulation of money isn't my metric for personal success. Not even in the top five for me TBH.
True.
The people who bought before the bundle was updated would need to return to the page to download the updated version.
They will have access to it, but only if they return to the asset page and download the revised version.
This is why following an asset creator can be critical. I have 140+ followers now and those are the set of customers who notice when a significant asset pack update gets posted. Other past buyers tend to miss out. And it's a bit of a shame because some of those updates are quite substantial. One of my texture packs is now almost 3x bigger than when it first launched. Some of my 3d asset packs are like that too.
The followers see the updates in the itch feed. They are actually notified of updates. So that seems to matter a lot.
-Matthew H, matthornb.itch.io
Try scrolling over it or moving the cursor over it. Just to check that it is, in fact, genuinely not working. If that fails, try reuploading. If that fails, try rebuilding the GIF with loop number set to '0' so it doesn't stop looping after a set number of plays. Maybe it played once or twice before you got to it.
In my experience the itch.io gifs often only play when they're the focus, like in the middle of the screen height or being moused over.
It seems to be a design choice to minimize visual clutter on large grids of projects which otherwise would in many cases all be moving in a ton of spots. So the person browsing usually must have that icon in or near center of attention for it to play.
I have some GIFs used this way and I realized fast that the first frame must look solid and clear in its information because in some cases here that is all a person will see.
- Matthew H, matthornb.itch.io
Unfortunate. A lot of things seem to be slow to happen on itch.
The '7-10 day' cashout reviews for example are also often getting slower gradually over time. They often exceed two weeks now.
Just generally, I think the itch platform is probably understaffed and the people sorting through its issues are overworked and this means a lot of tasks fall behind schedule. They do seem to actually be trying though and I can appreciate that.
- Matthew H, matthornb.itch.io
I personally see this happening with any outbound link to any page not on itch.io.
For example, I sell asset packs (textures, 3d, etc) and if I try to link to Turbosquid, CGtrader, Fab, Ko-fi, anywhere else any of my work is available really, I get this exact same message regardless of the safety of the site being linked to.
It means nothing and doesn't really reflect actual levels of risk but it does potentially unnerve visitors to your itch page, so in the end I have reached the decision just not to use those outbound links, I am currently removing them even knowing it would be nice if my success starting to occur on itch with $450+ in sales could be extended and connected to more venues. The asset packs I sell combined have a total 18 five-star ratings, lots of positive feedback emerging, so they are good, and they are just as good if purchased on another major site but itch's system with outbound links doesn't seem to care if that is the case.
- Matthew H, https://matthornb.itch.io
Not quite - clearly, this project is way shorter as experiences go due to absence of the immensely challenging puzzles the Myst titles had which locked off much of the setting until they could be solved. But with the reliance on creative art direction, a sense of atmosphere and mystery, and a heavy exploration element all is very similar.
And you know what? I love how distinct this release looks. It reminds me not only of its stated influences but it feels a bit like 90s vaporwave almost. Which has much to do with the color palettes used and the use of stylized geometric designs that are less interested in photorealism and more just looking cool and imaginative.
BTW, Myst and Riven definitely were major influences on me as well - they made me push hard into 3d art as I realized what was becoming possible with that - and both have awesomely detailed UE5 VR supporting remakes on Steam now.
I have several game dev projects quietly moving forward that are drawing inspiration from that sort of game except one in particular, Miniature Multiverse, is 75% done using realistically detailed O scale miniatures in the environment art. Sort of a Myst 3, Myst 4 UI used there, lots of panoramas captured inside sprawling models built in my garage. And the visible garage roof around each landscape swapped out, replaced with sky of course. All of it digitally extended, sometimes with fluid simulated oceans faintly reflecting a 3d scan of the model. Not done yet and still even now likely a year off. For now mostly it's just asset packs for game devs released, not actual released games, but that will begin to change significantly by this summer. I am excited about that but still a fair amount left to do to make it happen.
Looks pretty cool.
Sort of reminds me of Venineth, or Exo One in the marble rolling element but this seems way less abstract and alien, more grounded and looks beautiful in its own distinct way. I had never actually heard of the original InFlux but this looks promising.
Matt H, matthornb.itch.io
That's a deeply rough experience and it underscores how difficult it is to be an indie game dev. Years of work only for the project to basically go nowhere as a result of some bugs you had not caught. I'm sorry.
I will try to place emphasis on fixes myself but there is no way a solo developer with no playtesting team will identify every possible issue so this is definitely of concern to me going forward on my own projects.
My recent Escape Simulator level for example was free and graphically tons of custom stuff went into it but it got trashed likewise due to a number of serious bugs and most of them I hadn't even realized existed until release so... that is a good example from my end but at least that was a project scaled in a month not years. It tells me this is a huge project ruining risk and I need to finish not only the core features of upcoming bigger projects but playtest heavily with anyone I can find. Sit back and see where people are getting stuck. Take notes. Adjust and fix as needed.
Hopefully that goes well.
And hopefully you can recover from your first launch as a lot of what you did the first time came close to succeeding.
Thank you for your input and for being understanding of the issues I have recently faced.
Yes, the first release will be the forest / graveyard setting and other areas will appear in the early months of 2026 as updates, and everything will be organized in different subfolders as it arrives so it shouldn't be too hard for people who have the collection to find what's relevant to them in it.
The first set of material is pretty much done right now as of quite recently along with three other unrelated things, and the plan is to launch all of that in just under 48 hours, around the time the bundle sale begins. December 24th, that afternoon.
It is odd seemingly to push things back by a few days - why not release immediately the moment it is all done? - but though some aspects of itch's algorithm seem a bit vague it appears that the week or so after a release or update offer higher ranking in search, and increased visibility right at that time. So if the release is *right before* the peak of itch holiday sales, when a sale discount also is accessible on my shop, that seems likely to boost public awareness of the collections. Maybe help people find this package I just spent a ton of time building.
And everything I've got is quite inexpensive during those types of events so hopefully volume of activity can compensate a bit for the lower end pricing per sale made.
And ideally these packages once widely seen and priced low, prove useful to a lot of small developers. Maybe I will see some of this material showing up in some imaginative indie games here, which would be great.
This project is graphically intriguing, large in scale and scope, and seemingly a focus of ten years work, which is possible to believe, definitely, given how good it looks - and yet has been entirely lost in the mountain of often far less ambitious titles that just happen to conveniently fit the audience of itch gamers and this group's preference for freeware horror genre material. I've opted to follow your account and will aim to buy the game at some point fairly soon.
I really want to support a wide range of solo devs and indie creators like you. I know what that experience is like firsthand and it isn't easy.
You really should promote your work more widely, I found it only by total accident today and it's clear that despite its ambition the amount of feedback surrounding it is almost nonexistent. Hope things pick up for you. To some extent however that is up to you to make happen. If I had worked on a singular game for ten years and it looked like this I would definitely try harder than you seem to have, to make the public aware of it. I don't even have a finished game project yet, just a ton of texture packs and other game asset stuff, but even so tens of thousands of people have seen what I am doing. Partly because I openly tried to let the world know what I had, I was proud of my work and the sheer amount of time put into it all. I believed it had value to other game creators.
Try social media promotion especially videos and GIFs and images on visual sites like Youtube, Instagram and Pinterest, forum activity that answers questions but includes a link back to your work, maybe even paid ads. Consider a small chunk of the game as demo and promoting that too as free stuff has a tendency to gain visibility on itch.io to a degree that paid games don't. And the demo might generate not just traffic but full game purchases. Promotion isn't even just about making sales, it's about having people know your creativity exists and giving people a chance to experience the creative vision you pursued and have the experience you intended. Ultimately we make games and put all this effort in hoping someone somewhere will play them, you know? I hope it works out and you don't give up because I am seeing actual skill here.
Matthew Hornbostel, matthornb.itch.io
I will agree with the post above.
Environment elements are working for me. They're what I make mostly and they are starting to succeed in a major way on my shop.
But another note and it should be sort of obvious, but:
Look at what 3d games people are actually making - seriously, what is in those types of games that is frequently used? Obviously the itch players play a ton of horror games and the games on itch that trend are often playable in browser. I started off making a lot of general purpose environment nature packs, with outdoor trees, ferns, bushes, wildflowers, grasses, fallen branches, stones, little mushrooms, etc - and those did well for sure over time. So did street details, interior furniture, and other categories including massive success with big packs of seamless PBR textures and decals.
So that all worked fine, but I couldn't help noting that of the little freebie extras on my profile, the blood stains and sprays - kind of added as afterthought - were the most downloaded, and then when I posted a teaser for an upcoming horror pack I got a ton of views and a five star rating of it before there was anything at all posted there. There was literally just a teaser still and a text description of the planned content. But somebody was so excited they rated it before anything there at all was downloadable. And that has never happened to me before.
All to say, PSX tagged type assets are popular and horror even more so, and I think the PSX retro tag is mainly trending due to it being a proxy for 'efficiency' and low texture filesize, low polycount. Which are also a clear style to some degree sure but also assets tagged PSX will tend to be able to run well in web browsers on this platform. WebGL games demand extreme efficiency and strong optimization, because the effective max resource usage of a browser tab is, for now, 1gb. Including other non game stuff in the tab, including the download of the entire game and its active runtime memory use. Even recent mobile games now can push well above these constraints on newer phones with 4 or more GB memory use and similarly large install footprints. So there's a clear market for lean, efficient web friendly assets and for horror assets in particular, including horror environments.
matthornb.itch.io <- my itch shop/profile. Made many hundreds of $ in sales already across well over 200 transactions and have 17 five-star ratings from various buyers on various asset packs and the level of activity is rising fast, over a dozen purchases over Thanksgiving 2025 alone. So I clearly know what I am talking about at least a little, and am doing something right it seems.
My view is as follows: Offer a bunch of great products and price low, as in impulse buy territory, and have a few freebies in the mix to grab people at first and give them a reason to follow your profile. I have 135 followers there so far. Include in bundle sales massive discounts and include upcoming content in such bundles so buyers can keep returning once every month or two and each time find something new somewhere hopefully. Keep building new things and periodically expand existing packs. Treat it as a serious effort and keep it going and growing. It can't develop a following overnight. But given time if it's a following big enough it will make money even with tiny price points, just based on the sheer number of people present.
Bonus tip: I promote the shop like crazy and am proud of the work I did and thankful to the early adopters who gave the material a chance and rated and posted comments, questions, other feedback and helped get it moving. I am posting on social media, commenting on Youtube game dev videos, posting here in the community, and on forums I frequent. There is a risk of going too far and seeming spammy and it's important to provide valuable info and responses that are helpful, not just links spammed everywhere. But if you can do that it can be really effective. I also have some paid ad spend and found some banner ad networks off on the edge, not the obvious stuff like Google Ads, Microsoft Bing, or Meta, but pretty obscure spots on obscure banner ad networks that are I think undervalued due to sheer obscurity. Back in the day Project Wonderful was like that, you could routinely get clicks for as low as 1/5 of a cent in the right spots with relevant audiences with the right animated ad fitting the slot. I haven't found much quite that good since but there are spaces that can come fairly close. Even now. And with such careful targeting I have seen ad campaigns hit the point where every dollar poured in directly results in $1.50+ in sales consistently now (and rising) so that, if you can hit that sort of threshold, can absolutely cause explosive growth seemingly out of nowhere in mere months, just cycling the profits back into ad spend every month until suddenly it is resulting in levels of sale activity every month that used to take years.
Did that with eBay and Etsy in the past but those were unsustainable - kept raising pricing over and over but the pileup of orders and entusiasm rose so fast around the 250 review mark that I could not possibly keep up. So the shops failed due to their success. Here (with asset packs) I hope that will not occur simply due to the different nature of digital products not requiring personalized customization and shipping, packaging of every individual order. But we'll see how big it might get. If I am at some point making over $7k a year doing this any amount above that will be donated across various lifesaving causes. Trying to help people and hold global society together with string and duct tape essentially as long as possible in spots where almost everyone else has sort of given up and abdicated responsibility for the well being of the desperately poor. People sick and starving and lacking access to clean water.
I am weird like that - I believe the global financial system is due for a massive crash fairly soon and that a polycrisis (everything bubble) is nearly ready to pop. Could be wrong. We'll see. I am frustrated with my country's hyperindividualistic views and wish we in the USA could understand that everyone has value, and that everyone deserves consideration. We aren't even pretending to be America First now, we're Rich America First, and 99.9% of the people on the planet are screwed over by it so a few billionaires can control everything. And any moderate notion of redistribution that might partially counter that funnelling of everything to the top is dismissed as communism. I'm not advocating for communism, I'm advocating for a few small limitations on capitalism so that life is livable for most people, and there is a difference.
The system is going to correct and start declining at some point, and the losses can either be taken from those who already have almost nothing, causing them to die, or from those who can afford such losses. If the former path continues to be chosen I suspect the poor won't all go down peacefully but will cause massive disruption, bloodshed and protest in the process. Society holds together as tenable longer if those at the top sacrifice more to maintain stability. Maybe it even buys time enough to find breakthroughs, scientific solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
So I don't feel like investing in anything other than helping people. If I am going to lose money I might as well do so in a way that makes a difference. That's me though, it's how I see it and I am odd that way. I'm a doomer sort of due to environmental awareness and recognition of resource overshoot, rising contamination of what is left, but not a prepper, I don't think there is any point to prepping as anything you stockpile will inevitably make you a target for a bigger group of people who will steal it all. Better just to give everything away and liquidate it in time, and die quietly when the world ends instead of trying in vain to survive when there's realistically likely not any way to actually do that past a certain approaching point. Most humans probably won't make it through next 20 years and I understand that and accept it. I made peace with it, better let the people who are determined to survive be the ones who do.
It's not my aim to be one of the ones who survive, my dream is just to make some sort of significant difference in the world for others before I die. Maybe prolong the decline a bit and buy a few more minutes or seconds for society. If enough people recognize what is happening and do likewise and make sacrifices individually we might together even extend stability by months, even years.
That would be nice.
3d models are worth doing well. It's possible to make nice renders but have wildly inefficient meshes and that is not good when it comes to game development, especially for web or mobile where optimization is critical.
Some optimization notes:
1) If a surface is not going to be visible to players, it doesn't need to exist. Delete it.
2) Do whatever you can do with textures, using the textures and not actual geometry. No reason a small detail like a groove in wood, an indentation, crack, nail or screw should be actual geometry, it's best kept as a normal map when your objective is a game engine.
3) Yet, not every PBR texture is always needed for every surface. Some objects really will shine, reflect in spots and need a reflection / specular map, but often there's no logic in doing that, same for any other maps irrelevant to a particular object. Similarly, know that you can use alpha channels to add some small and seemingly complex object detail that is not actually modeled, but it isn't always needed so if it isn't, ditch the alpha channel.
4) Organize UVs in ways that make the most of the UV space and emphasize the surfaces of objects that are most likely to be seen by players. That is, eye level stuff deserves a bit more space. Backs or undersides of things deserve less.
5) Consider size and distance. How much of the screen would the item fill given its size relative to players, and how far away will it be from them? Allocate texture resolution accordingly so things generally look good but don't require vast piles of texture files.
6) Physics meshes are not visual meshes. Make physics colliders simpler than the object's appearance to make processing faster.
7) Detail maps and decals layered here and there can add a percieved detail across massive surfaces like walls - detail maps are a texture layer that faintly tiles, like grainy patterns, and is blended into the rest of the surface and the main image texture. Can provide a vague sense of detail with less texture data. Decals like cracks, stains and so on can be placed here and there to break up any visible tiling.
8) Consider wear, tear, and realist damage. Few things in real life look perfect so the grungy battered and weathered details on a surface add a sense that that surface is real.
The methods described here are typical aspects of my process. I have hundreds of models with many more arriving soon. Thousands of texture maps, well over a hundred decals, overlays and VFX clips. They all go on sale over many holidays. Bundled for under $2 total. They tend to be hyper focused on efficiency over sheer resolution particularly with the models, but that's one of the best strengths of them. They're actually potentially useful for webGL, mobile games!
matthornb.itch.io <--- My itch page.
Seems really a lot like the types of assets I have been building over the past month for a new pack might be relevant here as they are 'survival horror in the woods' themed and include a flashlight, dead and dying trees, etc. Lots of other related stuff. Could create a 3d-rendered scene using some of what I have been building for my horror asset pack. Can get that rendered title graphic to you in a few hours. What resolution do you want the image in?
And it would of course be done for free, just would be happy for the exposure and the excuse to post a link back to my profile.
matthornb.itch.io <---
Marketing to non-gamers is usually, and pretty obviously, a massively bad targeting move.
You are aiming for an audience that by definition doesn't want your game. I tried that once with a defunct site galileegames.com and thought it was a bad idea even then too and we got rejected on mobile stores for proselytizing with a game. Which wasn't my idea either, and after nine months developing a rather ill conceived game we ended up with 200 dls total in the end outside of both Apple and Google ecosystems. Wasn't my idea, it was my dad trying to 'help' my career by co opting it. Despite his absolute lack of understnading of gaming and never playing games himself. Then was pushed to work at nonPareil Institute for a couple years with no pay, ended up running a side hustle on eBay by the end of that and it worked well enough that I finally was able to persuade my parents that if they just stopped trying to assist me I could actually get something done.
I love my parents. But they had no idea what they were doing when trying to 'guide' me into a career. And in fairness many things I did for a while after then failed hard too as a result of succeeding and scaling up too big too fast. eBay, Etsy. Both cases where the glowing reviews rolled in and more and more activity and while I kept raising prices it didn't stop and I got overwhelmed by orders placed and had to shut it all down as it was impossible to keep up. Now on itch the same boom is beginning to emerge but unlike those venues the products are digital and the sale volume can spike really high without ruining my life and leaving me completely sleep deprived and emotionally deranged. But I knew how to market. That is why these things worked until they didn't.
As for the idea that indie gamers are a clearly defined pool... they are not. There are many game genres and indies can succeed in a lot of them. Make a great indie game and there will likely be people there to play it. Minecraft started off indie and it's the biggest success story in gaming. A year ago Manor Lords was the most wishlisted game on Steam and it was a project by a solo dev. Indies, finally, are around 40% of video game sales made. They are as big or bigger than AA, AAA in sales volume. So indie gaming is not niche. It also is more respected than AAA lately as there is an understanding that indie devs actually care about their work and the projects are usually run by creatives who really want to make good games, not business execs who only care about optimal profit.
Basically when you are passionate about the work you are doing and your intent to create something great that enthusiasm is infectious and can build an audience. If you are convinced your game will be awesome, then you maybe shouldn't have qualms about putting it out there publicly and promoting it. Just tell people what you are doing. On social media, forums, in images of the project and video trailer on YT... it really can work. And when your actual goal is making a great game and not making a quick buck, it's funny how that emphasis tends to be what pays off. Just get addicted to the process of creating and not only the result. And if your qualms are still there about promoting your work, maybe your work needs more... work. It can be improved, the price lowered until it really is something you are proud of and truly believe is worth buying for customers.
So here I am making a few indie games in background and launching a ton of asset packs in advance of that. 3d asset collections, seamless textures and decals, some VFX clips and a few tiny freebies around the edges. You can find that here: matthornb.itch.io and there are thousands of asset files already there and many more arriving soon,
Thanks to everyone who supported that. It's becoming something amazing, and I am thrilled that it is happening. :)
Lost a hard drive suddenly in a storm out of nowhere once 15+ years ago before I was taking it especially seriously and some animations, recorded video files and game dev work down the drain back then but fortunately most of the really important stuff made it through. Now I make it a point to have cloud backup going on my work desktop! You should too. Personally I'm using backblaze but there are many good options out there. You should have a way to back everything up that's important if you can. There isn't really a good excuse not to. The typical IT advice is you ideally should have local backup of all important data (mirroring) plus offsite cloud backup. Three copies of everything across two locations means odds of stuff getting lost for good is very low. Make sure the backup system's automated and will keep up to date with changes with minimal time and fuss.
matthornb.itch.io - asset packs - 3d assets, decals, PBR seamless textures, VFX clips. Many sales on holidays and well over a dozen 5-star ratings to date. Thanks everyone for helping me get this off the ground!
Well, we're assuming you have a game made and it looks decent or has some aspect of it that stands out and makes people interested in playing it. And if you did that, that's the first step and quite frankly the hardest.
Once that is done...
-Try setting up a blog or site or some sort of online venue to promote the game. Not necessarily a high cost one but (something) if possible.
-Have a trailer posted on Youtube for your project.
-post screenshots on the game page so people can see what your game looks like.
-post those images on Instagram, Pinterest as these two social sites are especially image focused.
-tell friends, family locally and on any other frequented social networks. Maybe print off a few little business card type things with imagery from your game and a simple URL so they can find it online, and if the URL cannot be simple, then use a QR code maybe.
-Encourage ratings of your game, ask for feedback and/or reviews on the game page and you're more likely to get a few people doing so. It will establish trust from future players and will also help in itch rankings maybe.
-Discord, set one up maybe for your project to build community and answer questions, and have a banner signature linking to your game in any forums, bulletin boards you are established in.
-if your game is a paid product, obviously, then consider a free feature limited demo so people can try it. Also if it's a commercial effort, you may seriously consider paid ads on some limited scale. If you can fine tune them enough to make the resulting sales exceed the ad spend then you can just cycle money through and end up when a huge phenom.
-There are also ways if you don't have a marketing budget to harness existing playerbase as your best marketing option. Like a contest in which people submit fan art and the top five get a free copy. Or affiliate selling systems, which are not something I think works on itch but I haven't actually researched that, in fairness.
-Consider building up revenue beyond the game itself. Ads on the site if it's a browser title, maybe crossposting to adshare sites like Kongregate, Newgrounds if that makes sense. Or selling extras like OST (soundtrack), artbook and making of materials etc. Or later DLC, addons. All of these are established tactics. There are many ways a game project can generate income. But my view is don't be excessive in monetizing things, I try to underprice personally and am a player, not just a developer so really dislike ads interrupting gameplay. Sometimes treating players well and respecting your audience will work out great for you, too - as it builds community and good will that can make for a sustainable business longer term. Plus I just dislike being a jerk.
-Consider selling or exchanging skills and assets. Music tracks, pixel art, 3d stuff, textures, sound effects, software tools and plugins. There has to be some part of game dev you are good at and if all else fails, and nobody plays your game then there may be some critical aspect of the game that isn't grabbing people and in fact is turning them away from being interested. Graphics and art style are the things that tend to grab attention initially, and well built gameplay gives the game longevity for players once they find you. If the graphics, sound or code is a weak spot and you have no clue how to do it well, consider trading resources with someone who has complementary skill sets, you help fill in a few gaps with their project while they help with the gaps in yours. Or you can just sell game assets widely for the sake of it making that a core product, as they're definitely valuable to people.
I have a few games moving slowly forward but mostly people are excited about my asset packs and find those to be why my profile is valuable - thousands of asset files in all, tons of PBR seamless textures, VFX overlays and decals, 3d asset packs. More arriving very soon.
matthornb.itch.io - I have a bit of credibility in discussing this topic, as 10,000+ individual people have loaded 100,000+ pages on my profile, already, 120+ followers. 200+ sales made to date worth $400+, and 17 five star ratings. Of asset packs. I have some games inching froward but generally that's still a ways off from being ready to go. It gives you a pretty strong indication that I know how to do this.
It's sometimes a bit grindy posting batches of stuff across various social channels but it can go well. Even posting here on the itch forums now and then is marketing in some sense as long as that visibility gets people to discover that your work exists. So at least you did that, and that is most definitely a start.
Good luck!
You're right, it's now past September and I am *still* working on getting this wrapped up with a first batch of about 35 unique assets. I'm really sorry about the delay here. There's not really a valid excuse for it aside from just the rotation between seven other asset packs I'm rotating between, both updates to existing packs and planned added releases like Middle East, etc that themselves have people asking for launch soon.
I am now really close, should have a release ready within a few days though. Probably by Oct. 15 or 16. Definitely a while before Halloween. Halloween is absolutely critical as a target for a horror collection I think, it has to be in place before then. And I realize this pack in particular is of value to the horror focused community on itch. I want to get it done well.
But ultimately maybe it's best to have something out by then even if it's not as complete a start as I intended. I might shave off one or two objects from my queue just to get this out in the next 3-4 days. Because it's definitely behind schedule at this point.
If you post a content update that adds something of value to the game, and associated devlog, that can give it renewed attention and create signals that boost it in site rankings for a while.
Also as usual I will advise posting backlinks - that is, mention your work on social media, post intriguing and compelling images / screenshots on the likes of Instagram and Pinterest, video teaser/trailer on Youtube, etc. That all helps people find the game and takes time but is not costly financially.
Similarly, forum and blog posts, if you have a blog, or some online forums, discussion boards you frequent then you may want to make a blog post, and make the game present as a forum signature. If you have a website set up for your game that also helps.
Finally, third realistic option is paid ad campaigns. If the game is a serious commercial venture and is a paid product it might be worth it. Find the right keywords relating to the game, or use banner ad spaces on sites which are relevant in audience. I know, nobody much does banner ads these days but if you have a beautiful, focused and legible ad and better yet, one that is animated, you can gain hundreds of thousands of views and dozens or hundreds of interested real people clicking your ad, for a dollar in the right spots.
The fourth note here is if you have a paid game do have some freebies available eg a demo, and maybe extras like wallpapers, OST, making of materials, etc. Some stuff to draw people in who are not immediately inclined to buy.
Finally, the game has to be good, and look good and be playable and fun, and that is all the more true if it is a paid thing. All the promotion in the world will not help if there is nothing cool about your game that makes people want to play it.
There is a business concept called USP. Unique Selling Point. This is the thing that your game does that makes it distinct from others of its genre. It may be aesthetic (truly unusual art style and/or highly creative sound design), it may be a special unusual game mechanic or hybridization of some element of other genres, it may be a compelling and surprising story premise that hooks players.
In the case of some of my stuff I am trying to wrap up in 2026, it's the aesthetic that is the novelty. I have Miniature Minigolf, aka miniature miniature golf, a minigolf game with miniature art courses done in O scale, as in, I physically built them with a ton of model making methods, scratchbuilding them like a model railroad. And while the look is VERY handmade and stop motiony, the handmade courses were also scanned with NeRFs (neural radiance fields, a successor to older photogrammetry methods) so I could simulate water flowing through the courses in little creeks etc and have those fluids reflect a scan of the miniature surroundings. A few other digital animated elements are similarly well integrated in lighting and shadows and textured to look like little clay or scratchbuilt models, so the boundary between miniature and the occasional animated digital object is nearly indiscernible.
Similar aesthetic is being used in Miniature Multiverse, another little project in development, which I have described as a Mystlike adventure game on the easier end of the genre (first person, panoramic 360 degree nodal interface like Myst III Exile, Myst IV, Scratches, Schizm...) but it is all first person exploration of over a dozen sprawling and very detailed, realistic looking scale mini model environs. Each with a few areas. The worlds all built in garage, on huge sheets of cardboard and there was a whole experimental process trying to figure out how to capture the nodes. And again, the miniatures and digital extensions had to match well. Models were matched in a mapping and planning phase, to digital settings built in parallel and the models were extended again with digital skies and seas and other stuff surrounding the mini worlds. So each node involved a lot of painting out of garage stuff to replace the sky, etc with a 3d skydome and not... garage roof.
Be creative and do something that is like what other people are doing but with some twist that sets it as distinct from the rest of its category. That twist is your USP and creates a specific appeal your game will have that others won't.
Here's my profile: matthornb.itch.io. It's just a ton of gamedev asset packs now, but they're quite good and they have a combined total of 17 five star ratings so far. The asset sales will help me get gamedev projects over the finish line in the next year. Some 2026 indie game projects are teased as well as a handful of unreleased asset packs set to go live by end of 2025 so that clearly is confusing, especially with such items posted below some major paid asset packs that *are* released already and being actively updated and expanded now and then. I include the unreleased stuff as preorder material, in sales on holidays so you can get all asset packs with the 3000+ asset files and rising, and early preorders of indie games bundled all together for like $2 or less during most holidays.
My aim there usually is to price really low during sales and make up for it in volume of audience, and hopefully that will work.
So far it seems to be effective.
If you have gotten to the point where you have genuinely useful feedback, post it as comment or rating.
It's really extremely helpful both to the developer and to other potential players or buyers if it's a paid game or other product.
Especially given hesitation of itch users to trust anything that lacks prior feedback. Nobody here buys, downloads anything if there is no feedback. So posting feedback can make a massive difference as a signal regarding the legitimacy and quality of a game or product.
If there is a problem with it or worse it's actual malware, which has been known to happen on itch and makes people wary of downloading anything here, clearly a one star review helps protect future visitors and warn them.
And five star reviews that seem written by an actual human, likewise are a significant green flag and more so if there are a lot of them and they're from longstanding trusted user accounts that didn't just show up suddenly purely to rate that one thing.
I've found many people on itch.io don't even realize the platform *has* a star rating system, and it's not that prominent, but the rating system does affect sorting and visibility in certain areas and does matter somewhat in that sense. But its main value is in establishing trust and an understanding of what content on itch is good and has value and what is not good, not valuable, or sadly in some cases is even harmful.
My experience says eBayers rate things almost every time, Etsians only one tenth of the time at best, and itch users maybe 1/25th best case. The 1/25 only happens when they're actively asked to do so and when they realize the content massively exceeded initial expectations.
People usually are more likely to rate when ratings and feedback are actively requested and encouraged on the page, and when the page has content that provokes a strong reaction either positive or negative. Studies seem to suggest what we'd intuitively expect - if the game or other listed item is of middling quality in the view of its players/userbase there is a much lower likelihood of them rating it.
If it is exceptionally good, or awful/broken/scammy, they will be more likely to post a review. So that will explain the prevalence of one and five star ratings above 2-4 star ones in general.
Presence of feedback is vital. In my experience it is THE difference between a wildly successful product and one that's outstanding but completely ignored and never downloaded. When I first sold on eBay I had to lower pricing over and over to 90+% loss margin. Nobody bought what I offered. I was offering personalized art - paintings on canvas - and firstly nobody was thinking that was a thing you could find on eBay, nobody looked for it - but even as I promoted it and thousands viewed the shop, no ratings, no sales. '99 cents to have a painting personalized, made by hand with paint on canvas, shipped to you'. That was how low the pricing got. Finally someone took a chance on that and was completely blown away, just ecstatic. That I actually DID what was promised somehow for $0.99 and it was good. The same on Etsy, just absurd financial losses at the start, and yet four years later people were spending 20, 30x more on the same thing and the level of customer activity had spiked 1000x even as the pricing was 30x higher. The difference was the presence of hundreds of reviews. It was indeed the ONLY thing that mattered and ultimately both eBay and Etsy shops were forced to close as people were buying so much so fast I couldn't keep up with it even as pricing kept being incremented upwards.
After that I realized digital products made prior to sale, were a wiser bet. The product already exists, hundreds of hours of work poured into it in some cases, it can be posted and sold an indefinite number of times, without each sale involving a set number of hours making, packing and shipping. So that is what I am doing now and itch has an easy setup for it, no obsessive formatting concerns (Unity asset store has some fairly specific rules for how to organize, name, and showcase all assets and given the sheer number of game assets in my texture packs... just probably not worth it.
I've seen this on my page ( matthornb.itch.io ) as there are now 17 ratings on my gamedev asset packs and they're all five stars. It was way less activity not that long ago.
Now over $400 in sales on itch and over 2000 downloads, over 100,000 page views from 10,000+ people. Overwhelmingly, the visitors the first couple years did nothing except browse. Now people buy especially during sales on holidays when it all combined drops to under $2. My aim has always been to err on the side of underpricing and make up for the low purchase gain with sheer volume of activity. It is finally working out. Or starting to anyway,
And I just want to thank everyone so much who has helped that start to take off.
It's going to be way bigger very soon.
I have a horror 3d asset pack now a few days away from launch, should be out by Halloween 2025, plus Europe pack, Middle East pack, Scifi / Space pack, Fantasy/medieval asset pack, and many updates to already launched texture and 3d packs... all of these additions should be out by end of 2025. Hoping to have the total released asset file count at over 5000 by the end of the year. Right now? 3300+ asset files released and 300+ more across various packs and updates in progress on the brink of release.
But it would not be my primary focus now if not for all the feedback and positive ratings that helped me shift from having a store on itch that I promoted almost relentlessly and truly believed was promising but that almost nobody bought from to one that's suddenly increasingly popular. Those ratings MATTER!
I figure even if nobody is replying with specific individual requests, you can kind of tell what developers here want to have available by what game devs are releasing.
I see a TON of horror games for example so horror themed assets are something I am prioritizing work on now. There are both 3d and 2d games and you can drill down with tags to try to get a sense of the proportion of various types of styles, etc. And then build to cater to what people find useful.
I am about to release an update to my little freebie blood fx pack for instance as that is proving popular and I will soon have both a free and a larger paid horror pack added, plus updates in various other areas. Lots of new texture maps, 3d assets, etc. Some of those are more general purpose nature, indoor items.
My asset pack shop is doing okay, has made a few hundred $ in sales to date, has 129 folllowers and 17 five star reviews but it's been many, many hours of creative work getting there and much more is still there to do.
( matthornb.itch.io ) - my shop.
First is putting the sheer labor and time in to make a polished project, have a game worth playing and visually appealing screenshots, video trailer showing what it is and what is great about it.
Then just promote like crazy once the game is completed and released. Social media posts, comments on communities you are active in.
Paid ads can work if your game is a commercial venture but don't expect immediate payoff. Do some testing and find some ad spaces and settings that can result in net gain. Tweak the ads and do A / B testing to optimize both the ads and the game page. If your campaign is fine tuned well enough that the ad spend is profitable then go all in. If a $1 ad spend = say $1.20 in sales then you can just sort of keep ads running and cycle the earnings through for a while and build up to the point where you have a massive phenomenon. But that's not common.
I am not a game dev primarily, but I am selling assets on itch like photo based PBR texture maps and 3d assets, VFX elements and decals, so that is my focus here. And it is kind of working for me at this point or starting to, as I now have exceeded $400 in sales and have 17 five star reviews, 129 account followers, and various encouraging comments across a bunch of asset packs. Am also working on game dev in background and hoping that I can start ramping that up too soon to the point where a handful of projects are released over the next year. Which seems unrealistic maybe but given some of those date a few years back and are over half finished, it's not that crazy.
It is basically my full time focus now as of mid September. I had an Etsy shop up til end of 2024 and that is over, plus some successful gigs locally this summer (2025) that all mean I can push heavily into massive itch updates over the rest of the year at a pace that nobody has seen happening in the past. I am pretty excited about it but also aware that itch has limitations as a platform - and that it's worth branching out to sell things elsewhere too like Fab, Turbosquid, etc. It's a lot of hard work and creativity and thought and planning poured in but that ultimately is the only way to create a range of truly great products.
matthornb.itch.io <- my page.
This is extremely depressing and explains so much about peoples' hesitation around file downloads.
I am trying to sell asset packs for game devs and a few have taken off in a major way or started to, but others are going nowhere, which may be because of the sheer distrust most itch users have of everything that isn't, as you put it, 'green flagged' by a ton of prior positive reviews and comments.
Social responses, genuine honest ones, are essential to everyone. If a thing is genuine, make a note of that and make it publicly known that the content is real. If it is not safe, if it is dangerous, post that negative response and report the scam as soon as possible. Warn people if there is an active scam in place and inversely, encourage material that is authentic.
Also, while curation in a censorship sort of form should not be itch's thing, maybe a battery of automated virus and malware scans should be in place for files people upload. It could help limit this type of damage even if it fails to catch everything.
That's awesome knowing Butler has the higher file size potential as I didn't even know it did. I have had a pair of absolutely massive asset packs which were in the 1.2 gb range and mainly that's due to the high res video VFX elements.
But I had little difficulty just splitting up that material into a list of a few downloads under a single payment.
Maybe some devs with really ambitious PC game work can consider splitting the game project into multiple files / packages as well with clear install instructions for how to assemble them in a single folder so it all works. Not an ideal solution but it is another possible workaround.
Thank you! It's great to see that people are finding this material useful. You didn't need to credit me [per the notes in earlier post] but all the same thanks so much for doing so. :)
I'm a little behind schedule on it but a few new elements should be added to this pack very soon as well. As in, animated blood stuff that is actually pretty realistic, built with physics accurate liquid shader and fluid simulation. I'm working on that right now in between wrapping up the furniture 'electronics' update and getting ready to post that additional stuff to the furniture/interiors pack.
Also the horror asset pack listing here will see a batch of .PNG cobweb decals added for free really soon too. The full release is pushed back to Sept. 2025 but that free part at least should be accessible by mid August. Still amazed by the supportive feedback from you and many others and in the case of the horror collection, it's not even launched yet but already somehow got a five star rating (!?) so between that and the obvious value of horror assets to itch creators it's clear that is a collection that needs to be fast tracked, with some free and paid 3d and 2d files made available as soon as possible.
Definitely trying to build on all the resources here because people like you are clearly using them. Makes the work more rewarding, knowing people like it and find uses for it in all sorts of awesome projects.
As noted in the image, six more VFX clips have been added to this package in the past week. And given how things are going I should be in position to pursue a major hardware upgrade by late August. Which will mean large scale physics simulated VFX elements showing up later on as well.
But of course 3d assets are also a priority, and game dev, and textures. I'm rotating through a LOT of tasks right now. But some of that stuff going on in the background could be revealed and made available quite soon.
Thanks for your query Tegurd.
Not any formal license here but basically with all the existing asset packs:
-any use in a derivative work - commercial or noncommercial, pretty much no restrictions on that and modifying the assets for a specific use case is fine or using assets unmodified, in a work that builds on them in some new way, new form like a game level, 3d art render, VFX shot or sequence, etc.
- no crediting of author required, but:
-only real restriction is don't redistribute entire asset collections as is or try to claim you made them, try simply to resell a pack I made, etc.
Essentially common sense applies and in most situations you will likely to be able to use this however you want to, but if a specific ambiguous case occurs you can certainly ask about it.
As for the query some may have: Yes, I do have plans to expand this pack a bit with a few more elements soon. But a few other things which are now nearly done are going to be prioritized and those updates released first. I am optimistic no fewer than five asset packs should be seeing updates in the next 12 days. Some useful new material is pretty close now.
There's not an official licensing rule at this time, pretty much any imaginable usage of these texture assets in other work is fine short of reselling/redistributing the package as is.
You can use the textures & decals as a resource in 3d renders, game levels, VFX shots with no particular limitation or constraint on such uses.
As long as you're building something new using them instead of just taking the package unmodified and trying to resell it.
Attribution's not required. You can modify or not modify textures as needed for your particular scenes. There's no particular limit on how many are used in a derivative work.
No limitation on number of computers an individual can load it on or on number of creative projects using it as a resource. The goal is to keep things fairly open and basically ask for common sense to be applied.
