itch.io

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.

Well, game creation is a form of art,so I yeah, the preservation is certainly a good thing to take in mind, and I like the way hechelion made the parallels with people like Mozart. Now in my case, I guess some games of mine are set up with a license that even permits you to do so as long as I am credited as the original creator.

Still I am wondering if itch.io is the right platform for this practice (even if the games' licenses allow it). 

Star Story is a sci-fi themed RPG game, which has had a complete overhaul.  The older versions were suffering from long loading times, and a few slowdowns, but all that trouble belongs to the past now. The current version written in Scyndi's Creative Interpreter (a game engine I coded myself in C++) loads quickly, and also has full support for Linux (which was with the past versions only possible with tools such as WINE).

The story is about two girls with a dream to become space cadets, however when their first mission ends in a total disaster they decide to give up their careers. Wendicka Lovejoy, daughter of admiral John Lovejoy, who suffers from a "curse" (Wendicka uses that word by lack of a better word) that makes her unable to eat and drink and live on electricity, decides to become an engineer on the space station Excalibur, and Crystal McLeen, who was turned into a cyborg or she wouldn't have survived the first mission at all, became a barmaid in a pub onboard Excalibur.

But then it happens, Excalibur, symbol of the invincibility of the Interplanetary Federation (IF) gets invaded, the girls have to flee the station and there the adventure truly begins. How could these Astrilopups (the aliens who invaded the station) get in Excalibur? But there are more questions? How did Wendicka get cursed in the first place? And last but not least: Nobody knows who saved Crystal's life by turning her into a cyborg.

The game features:
- Quick mouse controlled interface, build to be quick in use and easy to understand
- Scenario available in both English and Dutch
- Three difficulty settings, which change the game experience drastically (there's a reason why you cannot change the setting afterward)
- Not only a main quest but also several sidequests
- A strong story line full of mysteries to uncover
- New Game+ feature that allows you to transfer your characters fully into a new game, but the enemies will also be stronger, but better items can also be found.
- Works on Windows and Linux

https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/star-story

That's basically up to you. Normally when you unpacked a zip file you can keep them for your own personal archive, or if things go wrong with the unpacked version that you still have the original zip. If you do not care about such things, you can  delete the zip files, the game will work without them. 

In my RPG games I coded a simple database program to take the trouble away from me, well partially. I can just easily edit all the names, descriptions, and of course all other parameters. The program itself can output all this either into code or at least in a "language" that is very easy to parse in game. My database program even contains the feature to duplicate records so I only have to edit those fields that are actually different.

The reason I took this trouble... Because I know this pain. Now it's still a lot of work, I gotta admit that, but at least it did in the end cut the time I needed in half, it it wasn't even cut into less time.  

For enemies you meet in an RPG I also often whip up a quick program that allows me to quickly enter all stats and abilities and link for alternate strategies certain enemies can use against you (so I only have to code those).

Of course, that's my working style, and for me it works.

It's absolutely clear that somebody came here not understanding the platform at all and moans about it, and the entire community gets in a state of an uproar.

I'd like to know who told you it was like Steam or if you understood them well. Of course, itch has client that allows you to easily install games get them automatically updated and so on, und so weiter, and yeah, I guess it's like Steam in that perspective. Yet the essence appears to be different on a few vital points. Steam aims from a more commercial perspective, making it easier for the game industry to sell games. Basically Steam replaces the old physical game store, were you used to buy games on diskettes and CD-ROMs. However since the internet made that obsolete, I guess Steam became that on-line replacement. Itch is more aiming to give smaller studios and hobbyists a platform. Then you shouldn't expect the technical extremes that some professional studios throw in these days (if the game really gets better by it, is a discussion on its own by the way). 

Now when it comes to "hiring"... I'm not hired by itch to put my games on here. It's rather my own personal interest to use itch for that purpose. But if I were to put my games on Steam I wouldn't be hired either. Of course, if I'd sell my games here (which I don't) I would get money and itch sees to it that I get the money for games I sold, however, that's not hiring. Itch is then merely taking away the pain from me that handling money transactions over the internet can bring. I'm not an itch employee (nor do I have the ambition to be one).

And there's also something else. When I see posts like these, I can't help but the check the account used to post it, and a few things immediately caught my eye.

1. A nick in stead of a name (on its own not a miracle as most people here do, and I guess I'm one of the few showing my actual name, but in combination with other factors, it becomes interesting).
2. No avatar set
3. The only action I could find on that account was posting the message that started this thread. No other activity has been found. Of course, I am not a moderator here and I don't know if I'd be able to find more if I was, but I think it's safe to assume that this is the only action ever posted with that account.

Of course, I've visited many games sites that disappointed me, or simply were not the kind of game site I was looking for, and that's alright, I guess we all have diferent needs and preferences, but normally I just leave such sites without leaving a single word. Here somebody actually took the trouble to create an account and to leave one single message no more, no less, and no response whatsoever on the replies of people. I wonder... Couldn't resist thinking it's cute to leave some negative "feedback" (which shows the point behind this site was completely missed), or is the poster of that message secretly reading all the replies laughing his/her ass off because he/she got this place in an uproar. 

I'm curious.

Hi Jani.
Long time, no see.
A very cute charming game. Simple concept, and yet getting harder and harder to solve. It reminds me a bit of Karoshi in which you also had to die in a platformer, however Karoshi is still more looking like an action game, and this is actual a true puzzle game. The game is easy to learn and yet despite its simplicity hard to solve at some point. Very well done, Jani.

I'm glad I coincidentally saw this thread. I only visit these forums occasionally, so I could easily miss it.

I noticed that a lot of people don't know what a zipfile is and how to unpack it.

Like Hugues said it's not a good idea to fight a writer's block. Being not only a game dev but also a novelist, I know how frustrating writer's blocks can be. 
In the end forcing yourself to write will only lead into terrible results. Creativity, after all, only works if the ideas come up spontaneously, and are later worked out.

It's basically easy, you can see a lot of AAA=BBB in the files I linked your to. AAA is the tag the game itself uses, and BBB the text to be translated.

Of course in the section [LANGUAGE] you will see NAME=English, and TRANSLATOR=Jeroen P. Broks, well, there you can put in the Portuguese word for Portuguese as NAME and the name under with you wish to be credited under TRANSLATOR. The best way to go is to copy the contents of the upper link in my previous post into your favorite plain text editor (even Windows Notepad will do) and you can just translate everything right of every = mark.
Oh yeah, everything between [ and ] is for the game to find the sections by, but should not be modified.

I already explained how to use accent mark. If you type "Je suis fatig|'e" in the file the game will display that is "Je suis fatigé" (mean "I am tired" in French). 

I made the system as easy as possible.
 (If you wonder about the game itself: https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/house-of-cards).

Portuguese? That's interesting. Alright, I have this game House of Cards in which you can play several card solitaire games.
It uses simple file to get all the strings in the chosen language. 
The English strings can be found in this file: https://github.com/PhantasarProductions/House-Of-Cards/blob/main/SRC/Assets/Tric...
Just to compare here's the Dutch translation: https://github.com/PhantasarProductions/House-Of-Cards/blob/main/SRC/Assets/Tric...

Now I do not know if Portuguese uses accent marks and such, but in order to add those you can use |ue to get ë or |'e to get é and |`e to get è. Should work with any vowel, and if you need more, it won't be too much trouble to adjust my font file (I created the main font the game uses myself). Now this is a non-budget (and also non-profit) project, so it will be a volunteers job, but then again, the amount of text to translate isn't that much, either.

The thing is, Discord is a place where most people are. I've seen many many alternatives to chats, social media platform and forums, and safe as they may be, when you are all alone there, it will eventually get pretty boring and then it's often the matter of going back to the old, with all the risks it has, or remaining on your own. 
I've been on a few alternates for Facebook, but in the end, there was nothing to do there. Although I didn't recover my Facebook account, and I am still staying away from there. 

When Twitter was under fire, there were alternates like TruthSocial and Parler, however both were soon deserted, or filled with people only praising Donald Trump. Now I don't want to fire up a political discussion about Trump being good or bad, my point is rather that the world is more than just Donald Trump regardless if you love or hate the guy. So in the end Twitter was the place to go. Of course, now that Elon Musk bought it, things changed there, but if Musk is to be trusted, is something I am still not sure about.

Discord is not that much different. I know many Slack channels went to Discord due to Discord being better than Slack, well, when it comes to general user interface. If Slack is much safer, I don't know either. Of course, there's also Telegram. It seems to be pretty safe, although there are a few things about Telegram (in usage) that I don't really like. Getting myself onto servers without my consent, and all of them being scam sites about cryptocurrencies also doesn't really make my day well (at least that doesn't happen on Discord). 

That Discord is not really trustworthy was something I only expected.  I've had a few scammers on my tail also (although that's not Discord's fault. Any big network is bound to attract internet criminals, no matter how secure it is, you must always be aware of that). Time will tell if Discord will remain the main chat or if people will move. And that will take time. I mean, everybody knows that Facebook (or should I say "Failbook"?) is a scam, yet people are still on that platform. For some reason it's very hard to get people to move.

In the end it can always be a good idea to try a small nonsensical project first, to see if an engine/library got what you need. 
And when it comes to Unity being close-sourced, yeah, I too don't like that, so I think you got a valid point there.

I basically hate Python for big projects, most of all due to the identing rule getting very much in my way in large complex projects.
Now I have tried a few game engines for Python in the past. The big letdown with loads of Python stuff is that it's very dependency based. Which makes Python programs mostly very terrible for distribution. Which is fine for distribution on Linux I guess, since Linux users are used having to install tons of dependencies. On Mac and Windows I guess, it's a less good idea.

Now RenPy is most of all focused on Visual Novels. Since I don't do Visual Novels myself I have no experience with RenPy, all I know is that it's specifically for VisualNovels and that it's based on Python. I've played a few RenPy games. I was never sure if RenPy is just full of limitations or if people never really explored what it can do, to be honest. In other words, many games just looked the same, just having a different story. Same kind of thing I've seen with games made in RPGMaker.  

Now I did see someone recommend Unity and Unreal. I've no experience on either, but I do know that Unreal uses C++ and Unity uses C#. Now C# is not really that hard to learn, especially when you already know C++. I do know that Unity in particular is a popular engine and I've played many games written in Unity, from both amateurs and pro. I know you prefer not to learn a new language, but it can still be an engine to check out.

When it comes to a 2D game library that can be used in both C and C++, perhaps SDL2 can be a good choice. My own game engine is also built entirely on that. 
There are very good tutorials out there to get on the move with SDL2, and it's completely free and open source. 
Now I've never explored lighting effects, but it has a few quick dialog boxes supported. Of course SDL2 is set up to give you as much power as you want, so you may need to get a few things up yourself to get it fully to your liking.

Of course, when it comes to switching engines, you must really be sure doing that halfway a project is a good idea, as it can bring you a big crapload of work. I have no experience with Godot. All I know about Godot is its existence. I've always tried to be as self-reliant as possible, so I only rely on 3rd party code when I really have to.

Well, since I set up a regular solitaire game (House of Cards), I guess it's only obvious your game triggered my interest, and it didn't disappoint me. A very nice twist to the Golf family solitaire games (of which TriPeaks is one), and the graphics are cute, and I actually like them.  

First of all, I am a bit shocked to read about your health condition. I hope you'll get a quick and good recovery.

When it comes to games of mine that might suit the stuff you just named:
- https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/star-story Star Story is a turn based RPG in scifi theme. I also made a Star Story II https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/star-story-ii already
- I also have two fantasy themed RPG games https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/the-fairy-tale-revamped The Fairy Tale Revamped and https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/dyrt-net The Secrets Of Dyrt
- Cynthia Johnson https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/cynthia-johnson is an adventure themed puzzle game.

When it comes to a game to train you in typing then perhaps "Who Is The Virus" https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/who-is-the-virus can be a good choice. It's a CLI based games, so all actions revolve around typing commands. That two is a nice puzzle game. 

Then what brings you here?

Luna's Father

Always nice to see what people can do with ASCII art. 
I've been tempted to actually set up a game engine specifically for games with this kind of art, but my schedule always brought me to other things.

Thank you.
I really needed this encouragement. 
By the way, I'm still working hard on this game. 

Well the original English language file is here: https://github.com/PhantasarProductions/House-Of-Cards/blob/main/SRC/Assets/Tric...

Basically it's just FIELD=Text so basically it's just replacing all texts behind the = mark on every line with their English translations.

Only this part can best be left alone:

[^SYS^]
ACTIVE=Yes
CREATIONDATE=2/2/2024 10:18:07 AM
CREATIONTOOL=Rosetta

And in this part:
[LANGUAGE]
NAME=English
TRANSLATOR=Jeroen P. Broks
You can replace "English" with the Indonesian name for the Indonesian language, and in the TRANSLATOR field you can enter the name of how you wish to be credited as the Indonesian translator.

I hope that's all simple enough to understand. Thank you and good luck.

Luna's Father

Indonesian, eh? 
I cannot offer any money, but if you are interested in translating my House Of Cards game into Indonesian, let me know and I can link you to the file containing all the original English lines. 

Now that you mention it.... I didn't notice, but I see the post that made me notice this topic.
I agree that it would be better to lock this topic up, as nothing but trouble can come from this one.
(And sorry that I didn't notice earlier).

Define "most of the world".

Good old QBASIC. Since I already switched from BASIC to Turbo Pascal when QBASIC came out, I've not used it very much, yet I did like some of the improvements it had compared to GW-BASIC.

I'm not really fond to discuss politics on a forum like this. If you really want to know, I think she's bad news. But I don't trust Donald Trump, either. 

The first game I ever made was for the P2000T computer and has gone lost over time, although I've remade included it and included it in my Star Story game, as an optional mini-game.

The newest game I completed would be House Of Cards, I often like to kill some time with solitaire card games and I got a bit fed up with all the endless ads that the solitaire collection of Windows hunts me with, hence I came up with my own collection. It has more different kind of games also (the screenshot below shows Yukon solitaire, oh, and don't mind the Dutch language in that shot. The game supports English, Dutch, German and French).

Now my game Luna's Father is still in development, so I won't count that as my latest game yet.

Luna's Father

Luna's Father

Oh... I completely forgot I posted that, after 3 years. Well I still stand by what I wrote back then, and I'm glad it's still of use to somebody. 😉

For me it really depends on the project. Most of my game projects contain music on their own, and then having another source of music is not really a handy thing for me to have.

Now when it comes to focus, I can lose it quickly too, but if I really am in a good mood to work, then things mostly work out fine. 

I have heard about CFS and you are not the first I meet with this syndrome, but I'm afraid I know almost nothing about it, but since this has little to do with development in general, but rather with a medical status, perhaps the best way to go is to medics, but also to people who suffer in the same way you do. I suffer from the Asperger syndrome myself, and speaking to fellow Aspies (and one of my ex-girlfriends being an Aspie as well) did help me a lot to deal with loads of things. And this basically goes for all medical conditions. Speaking to fellow-condition-havers can always be by fare more enlightening than speaking to medics does, and this goes for both mental as physical conditions. After all the only way to fully understand what it is to have CFS is actually suffering from it, but even then there might be aspects of your own condition you may not yet fully know or never thought about, and that's where people who suffer from the same condition can sometimes have good pointers. Of course, every person is different, so what works for them may not always work for you, but at least listening to how they cope with things, can sometimes give you some good ideas for what may work for you. It's one of the ways in which I explored the Asperger syndrome. That's the only advice I can give. It does not matter if what they do has nothing to do with game development, as you may still find some things they do to make what they do possible.

Now perhaps as somebody who has the habit of sometimes drinking too much coffee, I may not be one to talk, but drinking caffeine solely to stay focused is rarely the way to go. I prefer energy drinks only when I need to drive at night, to make sure I get at my destination in one piece, but since I rarely have to do such rides, the danger is minimal, but in your case I guess things are different. But if there's really no other option, you may wanna discuss with a doctor how you can go this in a relatively safe way, or if there are any alternatives. It's mostly not a good idea to see medical advice on an open forum.

And with that I've given all the advice I can give, I'm afraid. I don't know how many people you may find on itch who suffer from CFS, as well. Perhaps you should look up if there are any places where people with this syndrome seek each other, preferably in your neighborhood so you can meet them IRL (which often works better than over the internet). 

I really wish you all the best.

I'm glad I was able to help.
Good luck!

Well, I did the survey. Since I code my own engines in C++, I have no experience with RPG Maker, whatsoever, but when it comes to game development tools in general, and this goes for both high level stuff such as RPG Maker, as well as low level stuff such as C, C++, Pascal and so on, that it can be fruitful to make a few test setups first not for publication. No trouble if they are crappy or ugly or whatever, but just to get the hang of how things work. Dennis Richie, the inventor of the C programming language said  "The only way to learn a new programming language is by making programs in it," and in my humble opinion he is fully right, and his words do no only apply to actual programming languages such as C, C++, Pascal, BASIC, etc. but also to tools such as RPG Maker, basically any tool you can use to create games in. When looking for good tutorials for absolute beginners keywords such as "getting started",  or "beginner" or "newbie"  can sometimes help in your search requests. I cannot imagine there would be no absolute beginner tutorials on the RPG Maker website.

Now being experienced in doing big RPG projects (which you can all download for free, my avatar is a character from one of my games), I can say that you should not underestimate the task of creating an RPG game. Especially when you plan to add minigames, which do require extra programming work, things can easily give you a lot of work, and having tools such as RPG Maker do not always remove all that work. All it takes away is the low level coding (which was in my own RPG projects the least amount of work to be honest).  And balancing might be your biggest horror. Having a party of 4 members of which one is almost invincible and the other would even  be slammed to death by a common fly, is an extreme example of off-balanced heroes. Especially in my older projects (which are not available for download anymore) I noticed I clearly underestimated that department myself. Of course, properly balancing the enemies to the player parties can also be a challenge. Especially when you want your game to be hard. I've faced a few times, as my RPG games all have difficulty settings that some hard mode challenges where not hard anymore, but rather mathematically impossible. 

Now a very common beginner's mistake is making dungeons too much of a maze. A few mazes can be challenging, but one maze after another will get annoying. And be sure to add a bit of cosmetic detail, like a torch, or a skeleton in chains. It's stuff like that, which can prevent your game from looking boring. But don't overdo it. Too much detail can also kill a game concept.

Now when it comes to battles. Are you going for instant random encounters? Or having enemies running around in the dungeon starting a fight when they get too close? Or completely realtime? In all three scenarios you should take care that combat does not take place in a location where they can be absolutely annoying. That's most of all the locations were a puzzle has t be taken on. If you have a puzzle in which the hero has to push blocks to certain locations, it can be a good idea not to have any enemies in that room. In most cases it can also be preferable to have the bosses have their very own room in a dungeon where you meet no other enemies except for the boss (I mean in different fight situations. A boss grouped with other enemies in one fight, can especially in turn-based combat work out nicely).

And what can also be very annoying to having to go back and forth too much. A key in the ultimate west, then having to go very far east to open the door, only to find another key there with its down all the way west again, can work out boring. As well as forcing the player to do the same dungeon multiple times. Sometimes the story line requires you to go down that road, but try to prevent it. Of course, shortcuts that can only open up when you have completed the dungeon once so you can skip a major part if multiple runs are required, can be a good idea.

And lastly, especially when you are long on the way, RPG projects can at a certain point kill your motivation to work on. It's a high crapload of work to do everything alright. Work as fast as you can, but remember to take a break and be honest to yourself when you really notice the project is killing you. Working on an RPG without motivation is THE way to get a terrible product. Be sure to retire the project temporarily on time and set a kind of term in which you'll resume the project. Of course when you wanna do this for money, I understand deadlines can make this a bad idea, but on the other hand, I am not sure if I want to pay for a rushed game. 

I hope my pointers were useful. 

True. Licenses do not protect you or your work directly, but they can only help you if you want to bring stuff in court or something, but unless the offender is a bit commercial company or something doing this on a big scale it will not be worth the trouble (not to mention that such companies can easily put themselves above the law, so you'll need a good lawyer too, and some publicity). 

Now I do not know how the itch.io staff responds to clear license violations on smaller skills. For example, Scyndi's Creative Interpreter is a game engine I created myself and released under the terms of the GPL3. Makes you free to use my engine, even in commercial productions actually, but if you modify the original source code create a new game with it, sell it without releasing the modified source code, then we got a violation of the GPL3. Of course, I cannot prevent people doing that, but I take it the itch.io rules do ban that practice, right? That being said, it can still be handy to have a license included in your game. 

When it comes to protecting yourself against copyright infringement in general. I was young in the 80s and 90s and have seen the countless creative ways in which game developers put in copy protections to prevent piracy. They all failed as document with the codes so you could print them, or even hackers managing to remove these protections were countless, so piracy happened any way and for legal users they were only a big source of irritation. Long story short, it was futile.