itch.io

Well, this sums up pretty well that whenever I write reviews I never give ratings (unless I'm writing a review on a website  on a website requiring me to). When I review I try to be informative and although I do give my personal opinions in a review (no escaping that) I try to prefer to focus on facts as much as possible. Ratings are too vague and indeed it's hard to say what a certain number of stars mean. But I guess no rating system either a star system (1-5) or a point system (1-10) or just "like"/"dislike", will ever work out properly. 

When it comes to rating system on sites like these, I guess it could make sense for myself if games are recommended based on my rating behavior. If I'd only give RPG games a high rating then that I only get RPGs in my recommendations or something silly like that. But that will sometimes also work counterproductive, as there are games out there pretty unique and which I really just stumbled upon and tried and liked and is unlike anything I ever expected. Hey, with YouTube videos I've encountered the same thing. So here too ratings can work against me.

Now in my opinion the best rating system is no rating system at all. But that's my personal opinion.

As far as I can tell, these games were simply developed for larger screens. It's not really a failure, but a developer's choice, and developers can have multiple reasons for the choices they make.
Now what kind of device are you using? A laptop? A desktop PC? If you know how to deal with display settings you may try a higher resolution. 

The only thing I'd personally use JavaScript for is when it has to work inside a web browser, to be honest. I've been using LÖVE for awhile, but  they took a few turns I do not really like...plus I hated the community. Now I use my own engine, so I never even heard of Solar2D.

Now what is important is what suits you best and the only advice I can give is try things out in both engines. Now I could not fully study it but Solar seems to instant testing what can make debugging faster. What I couldn't find about Solar is what OSes it supports. Having both Windows and Linux supported can be a good way to go. other than that it comes down to your programming style which you'll have to discover for yourself. 

I've been told (I could never confirm it) that in the time of video tapes VHS won over the much better Betamax and VCC2000, solely because Betamax  and VCC2000 banned porn on their tapes and VHS did not. I don't know if it's true, but  knowing humans, I deem it plausible.

Now porn is apparently as old as human civilization in general. Some artwork of very long ago that is clearly meant to be pornographic have already been found. So when games as medium came to be it's not that hard to imagine games like that would be there too. 

I must note that I do agree with NLCH about the "right" to porn. Now I don't deem porn itself as a right, but once porn can be banned than basically anything can be banned, and also games in which the developer did a statement that may seem "politically incorrect". And then the same can also be done with books, film, music, drawings, well anything. And yeah, I can see some propaganda against porn,  like a video were "Disney heroes were raping each other". It was just a porn video about orgy where everybody was initially dressed as  Disney princes and princesses, yes. But we do know rule #34: "There is porn of it! No exceptions!" And I've seen more like that. But then again, the anti-porn thing is nothing new. Sexual activity in general even. The idiotic story that you'd get blind when you masturbate appears to have been an actual campaign set up by the church and loads of people even believed it (and I really cannot find any medical logic how your eyes could be affected in anyway at all by this). 

Long story short... Porn has always been a thing for discussion. Quite often it's all pretty bizarre.

Hallo;
Ich hatte dein Spiel geprobiert. Es war sehr interessant om die zwei Teenager kennenzulernen. Ich hatte ein Video gemacht und versucht um auf deutsch Kommentar zu geben. Ich hoffe daß ich das nich vermasseld habe. 

Du hast ein schwierig Thema gewahlt für das Geschichte, und das kann fantastisch oder schrecklich werden, und ich hoffe daß du es schafft um es fantastisch zu machen. Viel Glück.

https://odysee.com/@TrickyPlayingGames:d/Unser-Eden:3

Okay, ich habe dein Spiel geprobiert.
Ich denke daß Koshi und Yuriko beiden sehr schöne persönlichkeiten haben und wenn du die Geschichte gut schreiben werden kann ihre Quest Ihre Eden zu finden sehr interessant  werden.
Ich habe ein Video gemacht  und ich werde es später uploaden. Ich gebe dir den Link wenn de upload fertig ist.

Perhaps a cabinet to store clothes in. It's something I have in my bedroom. 

And if you really want it very detailed, perhaps a lamp beside the bed, some electrical outlets in the wall, a ceiling lamp, some curtains at the window.

Nein, leider noch nicht. Ich hatte einige Probleme mit mein Zeit. Ich hoffe daß ich später diese Woche Zeit habe.
Ich oft versuche zu viel zu tun in zu wenig Zeit. Kannst du das Problem?

As a kid I always wanted to be a professional, but seeing what professional games have become, I guess it's only better that I never was part of that. At least not what it had  become (or was becoming) by the time I became an adult. Oh well... 

That looks very impressive. 

It's hard to me to say where my games shine the most, since ultimately it's the audience who decides whether or not a game is great or not. 

As I am both a novel writer as an RPG developer, I guess it comes to no surprise I am pretty critical to myself when it comes to story telling. As a matter of fact, it always means a lot to me when I notice people feel joy when the "heroes" of my stories feel joy and feel bad for those "heroes" when something bad happens to them. After all, that means my story and its characters somehow got people and that I basically did a good job as a story teller. 

For example I once showed a part of my Star Story game, and at the start something happens that brought the main heroine Wendicka to doubt herself even to the point where she wanted to end her entire career even though it had only just begun. That person actually felt bad seeing Wendicka being like that, and that meant she actually felt sympathy for her, even though Wendicka is only a fictional girl born out of my imagination. 

Now, not all my games are story based ("House of Cards" for example is just a collection of card solitaire games, and I also have some puzzle games, as well), yet I guess my story based games are the ones in which I try to shine most as a story teller, yet in the same time trying to offer a challenging game.

Deutsch is sehr schwierig für mich (ich bin niederländisch) aber ich höffe daß ich  nächsten Samstag Zeit habe (und es nicht vergesse) um deine Spiel zu probieren, aber ich benutze Linux, doch ich kann verschuchen das Spiel in WINE zu spielen.

Die Screenshots geben mir das Idee daß du viel Arbeit im Map Design gemacht hatte. Daß du die Geschichte am Vordergrund stehlt kann für mich eine guten Weise sein deutsch besser zu verstehen. (Entschuldigung wenn ich es vermasselt hatte  gut deutsch zu sprechen. Ich werde as immer versuchen, doch es ist schwierig für mich).

I've tried your game, and I'm pleased with what I saw.
Here you can see me struggling to get through your levels.
https://odysee.com/@TrickyPlayingGames:d/Duck-Game:29

"Exceptions confirm the rule" we say in Dutch.

Yeah, virustotal can be a big help, although you should also be careful on that one, as some virus scanners there will easily throw false positives (and also false negatives). 

Malware is unfortunately nothing new, and it's nearly impossible for communities such as itch.io to make the site 100% free of malicious software no matter how well moderated  it is. Now I've been a moderator on an other game site, and a few things came to my attention.

If you see a game with high quality graphics in the screenshots but the downloads are less than 1MB, you can be pretty sure it's just malware. I've only seen such low download sizes with games that use the console or are even entirely set up as a batch file (which is then mostly noted in the description as well). Very large downloads that turned out to be malware were very rare in my experience (not entirely  non-existent, though). 

What I also saw a lot with malware games was that they were dupes of legit games and then just searching the website can be a good idea. 


Now much malware focusing on Windows is only a logical step  as Windows is one of the most used  systems, however as Linux is gaining popularity lately, it only stands to reason that Linux gets more and more interesting for malware developers. Although Linux is an environment that may be harder for malware to do crazy things with, there's always a possibility and malware  developers are used to challenges, as they have to outsmart  anti-virus software (which also gets more and more sophisticated) all the time. 

Now what can also be a good one. I've seen multiple games from the same dev account reported in my own moderator days and all the malicious downloads turned out to be IDENTICAL on all the "games" they uploaded. 

Well, I don't want to pretend I'm an expert  on malware, but at least I can share what I've seen a lot

Well, likely Fantam from Breath of Fire IV.
Not only it looks ridiculous, but the boss is not even requiring any effort at all. Just make sure your entire party as full HP when you start this battle, and put the game in autoattack mode (all characters will then only do normal attacks until you break it off or until the battle is over) and make yourself some coffee. By the time you're drinking it, the battle has likely  already been won.

I currently use "Scyndi's Creative Interpreter", which I whipped up myself, using C++, which relies on SDL2. It may not be the most user friendly engine out there, but  it fits most of my needs

Since we live in an era of AI, I'm not sure captcha is still helping much. I've already tested a few AIs with this, and they could all bypass it easily.

I don't think a ban on links is the best way to go. Streamers who make videos about your game like to notify you through comment  sections with a link to the video about your game, same goes for people who might review your games. In other words it would block those people you can benefit from. 

Having links on auto-moderation requiring approval might be a better way to go. 

Welcome aboard, Luna.

Ah, I already thought the broken image games had no thumbnail in their submission. Perhaps a default icon for games without any images is a good idea. And yeah "bilingual" or "multilingual" might cover games in multiple language better. (My game House of Cards covers English, Dutch, French AND German, which is four languages, and yeah, I may submit it soon).

I've submitted my game Star Story just to see how things work out. I did notice some game had a broken image for a thumbnail, and sometimes I had a bit of trouble closing a window with the details of a game. Oh, and perhaps "science fiction" and "fantasy" could also be nice tags. 

Now I did add the "Other Language" tag as Star Story can be played in both English and Dutch, as per recommendation, but I am a bit conflicted  about this, as it can work a bit confusing, as people may think the game's not in English (which it is, but Dutch is merely possible as well). Perhaps having a separate  field for languages in which the most common languages are listed with "other" when a language that is not (yet) listed  is available in the game as well.

Just a suggestion.

"People will only acknowledge that when it is too late".

I rest my case!

Well, it's not because I'm against AI in general, but I do think it's swindling. Anyone can give up some pointers to AI and see if it produces some usable art, so selling that is just a lazy way to get money out of other people's pockets. Sites like itch should ban the practice (revoking the responsible account on the spot).

Games using AI assets, is also an idea I don't like but if the game itself is at least a creative piece of work, at least we got something. 

An entire art bundle with AI pictures, that is just cheap. If I were to buy art bundles I would pay for the effort it took to create such a bundle. 

I'm afraid AI is the end.

Stephen Hawking said it the way it will most likely be: "The full development of full  intelligence might well spell the end of the human race".

AI art seems innocent, but it's not. But as usual people will only acknowledge it, once it's too late.

Most ideas came up when playing games and wanting to make some additions to the genre. Quite often I can think easily of a few twists to make my game unique in some ways. 

Themes and story lines can be many things, like a walk in the forest and look around me. Sometimes it can be stuff I saw on TV or read in the newspaper or what people tell me. 

Now creating computer games is a form of art in some ways, so naturally good inspiration also comes from the same kind of sources as artists in other forms of art use.

Thanks for your explanation. I guess that given what you describe there the rain may indeed  have  that effect on the player. In this case it still sets a darker setting and ironically a ray of hope. 

And yeah, translating can be a good idea. If you look at my RPG games you'll see you can play them in both the English and the Dutch language and even though I used a special tool to do this rather quickly, it was still a lot of work. But I think was rewarding somehow.

For Star Story, Dyrt and The Fairy Tale I did release demos showing the first parts of the game while the rest was still in development, in order to have a bit of pre-promotion indeed. Sometimes a little feedback can then also help, as some fixes or features can be easy to implement in an early stage of development, but be a downright disaster when the project is almost finished. 

Now these were all games on which I had a very clear view on the entire story line and such before even starting on that. In Luna's Father I went a bit more "on the fly" and as such too much uncertain factors to go on. As soon as my revamp on Dyrt is finished, I should see to finish it though. I already implemented the final boss fight, but I was always in disagreement with myself about the game's ending.

There is no golden formula about weather, like rain, can be contributing to your game or actually be annoying. It really depends on when or how they are used and the situation within the game as a whole. 

For example, in Final Fantasy IX you have to pass through Burmecia, the realm of eternal rain. That nickname alone seems to justify the town being in the rain, right? Well not really. It's because when you arrive there the town has been destroyed and most of its inhabitants who could not get away being murdered that the rain actually contributed to make the scene more grim, setting just the perfect atmosphere. If you had visited the town in its glory days the rain would even with the nickname "realm of eternal rain" be rather annoying and could also have caused to set the wrong mood. The game developers KNEW what they were doing when making Burmecia the town where it always rains.

Now Burmecia is a place where the rain has been put on prominently. In Jazz Jackrabbit the world of Medivo is a world where it also rains all the time, but as a player you may hardly notice unless you pay good attention to the details the level designer used to make the levels look more interesting (which is always a challenge in 2D sideview jump 'n run games, in other words action platformers) The building you must go through does feature some windows allowing you to see the rain and it does make the levels look better, but it's more cosmetic and hardly contributes to the game experience altogether. Now I must also note that Jazz Jackrabbit  used a palette cycle loop for this, a technique very common for MS-DOS games using VGA, as it saved a lot of RAM and CPU power back then. 

Now when I look at your game, the rain does set a darker  atmosphere, and I hope that is what you tried to achieve, as I cannot make that out from a short clip (and I also don't understand the Spanish language, which doesn't help either).  The way it's implemented  works for me, especially having the rain sound in the background. 

When it comes to fog, I would only add it if that really is important for the game's atmosphere, since fog blurs the player's vision and that's quite often the most important thing in a game. I'm not recommending against it, but if you use that effect, be at least sure of what you are doing.

Congratulations, the first block I perform on Itch due to trolling. I didn't think it would happen here.

When it comes to "copying from others", well most people hate the "monkey-see-monkey-do", but the reason this was named after monkeys is because monkeys copy each other in order to learn. So especially in experimental work it can sometimes be the way to go in order to discover what suits you best and to have a bit of practice in coding ("The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it" -- Dennis Ritchie). All that can be important before you actually start a serious project. 

My advice is always:

• Lean from the masters. They faced the same problems you did before they became great
• Expect your first production to be crap, but don't let that let you down as what may be crap to other can be a good school for you to learn.
• When it comes to engines/programming languages. I know when I began, all we had was BASIC (and it cannot be compared to BASIC today). These days we got an overload of stuff. Nobody can advice what is "the best". You'll have to discover that for yourself. 
• "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place, therefore if you write your code as cleverly as possible, you are by default not clever enough to debug it". You're gonna hate Brian Kerninghan's word but  unfortunately they are true, and it doesn't matter if you use low level languages such as C and C++, or high level stuff such as Game Maker or Godot or even codeless engines such as ClickTeam fusion. Debugging will always be the least satisfying part of the job. That is something you will have to learn to deal with. Although debugging has become easier thanks to many debugging tools and loads of engines/languages even offering those by default, but it can still be a chore. I don't want to discourage you, but it's part of the job.If you can get up a good way for yourself to handle debugging, then you are well on the way.

I'm with hadhad@Had2Apps on this one. I don't have a problem with the phenomenon of sexual minorities itself, but the  way things are currently being "forces" and everybody who does have critics about it being "transphobe" before even examining if the points are valid or not,is what gets me in a negative view on the subject. 

I've one, but I was planning to remove it. I need a better translator for my work, as the English translation never worked out the way I wanted it to be. (The original Dutch version turned out better, and I found out the hard way, that I shouldn't do translations myself).

Simple yet fun concept for a quick game to fill a few lose hours in. Nice boss key, though. Now the game went a bit fast, which might be intentional as a kind of difficulty  setting, but it did get me sick easily. Well, since this is only a quick game, I can get by by not playing too long. 

It's really nice to see a first person game that is not an FPS.