itch.io

Okay, but what part of finding team mates and organizing with them actually needs a dedicated web app? Because all of that is stuff that works perfectly fine on Discord, or in the game jam forums here on itch.io.

With music this energetic, there needs to be some movement on screen to match the energy. At least have some animated transitions, some moving text instead of just static slides, some footage of someone doing something in your game.

But honestly, if your game does not have any exciting stuff you can show off in a trailer (which is fine - a lot of genres just don't go for visual bling), I'm not sure if making a trailer is a worthwhile use of your time. Even if you really want to market on YouTube, you could post a quick walkthrough of the game mechanics with voice-over, or some vlogs about your dev process instead.

The idea of games being reviewed before being allowed to the website raises some immediate questions:

• Is there a set of quality guidelines, or will games just be accepted/rejected based on vibes?
• How will you keep up with reviewing each individual game if you start getting dozens, or even hundreds, of submissions a day? Do you have staff? Do you have plans to hire staff? Do you have any plan for getting the funds you need for hiring staff? If you're trying to use volunteer labour, how do you assure that your reviews are made based on consistent criteria?

itch.io will manually review this, it'll just probably take forever because they are a deeply unserious company who refuse to hire an appropriate number of support employees.

In the meantime, I'd recommend you set up a personal website, if you haven't already, and distribute youe stuff through there, in addition to your itch.io account.

I like my Jenkins! I've used different tools for different projects and will keep doing so, but I don't go anywhere without a good CI pipeline.

If I understand the indexing FAQ correctly, projects may be rejected from indexing due to low quality metadata.

You have a typo in the title of your 2024 game and while i have no idea if that's the reason for the deindexing - it probably isn't - you probably should fix that. (It will make your product more attractive either way.)

First off: Not a guy. Pronouns are she/her. In the future, if you would like to own yourself further by spreading evidence of your behaviour all over the internet, please keep that in mind.

Second off: you're stealing the likenesses of dead people to put them in your game? That's... honestly worse than anything I have accused you of so far. And you just admitted that? Do you just not have a conscience?

Also, I'm posting this video to my Mastodon because it is incredibly funny.

AI Assisted means the game's creation was assisted by AI. Simple as that. It is a precise and accurate description of what it is.

You are still stealing photos of actual, real life people.

Tracking these people down via Reverse Image Search is trivial; if you keep going, I will inform them of what you are doing so they can pursue legal action. Please confirm for yourself how high the legal fees and the settlements for those violations of copyright and likeness rights can be.

You deleting and remaking this thread changes nothing - it only confirms that you have seen my messages and decided to continue infringing on these rights, i.e. it confirms that you are acting with intent.

Now, consider doing the right thing - which is taking down your games until you can remove the offending content.

itch does have a desktop app but it is extremely basic and for most things is just a thin wrapper around the website. For me personally, using it is just annoying.

My biggest frustration in terms of discovery on itch.io is that, as an adult game creator, i essentially have to choose between visibility and monetization.

I would be interested in uploading my content to a different platform, if that platform did not treat adult content as an afterthought, had robust monetization options (at least on par with itch.io) and was able to offer some plan for how to avoid future financial censorship, along with doing the bare minimum (being run by decent people, having working support, removing malware etc. in a timely fashion) that should be expected from every platform.

So first of all, that analogy with the wood toy is a bit vague. The metal part might have been made with a CNC machine or die cast - or it could have been made on a manually controlled lathe. In the second case, most people would call it "handmade", the same way that handmade clothes may have been sewn using a machine.

If the metal parts were made with automated tools, then I would absolutely say that the tool is partially made using automated tools, and the phrase "handmade" would require some very major asterisks.

I also do not think these distinctions matter when it comes to the Internet Plagiarism Machine. Personally, I do not care if 5%, 50% or 95% of a product were made by a virtual dumbass that makes slop by stealing from other people en masse. It is tainted for me in all of these cases. The only acceptable percentage for me is zero.

I am far more lenient when it comes to "handmade" artisanal products - like, i would not complain about a "handmade" chair using off-the-shelf screws, but those screws are not a good analogy for AI-generated boilerplate code because the machine that makes the screw comes with far, FAR fewer ethical issues than the Internet Plagiarism Machine.

So personally, I think the binary "yes/no" question is absolutely fine. Even making the distinction between AI-made graphics, text, code and audio is a step too far, in my opinion, because to me it implies that using the Internet Plagiarism Machine for "art" is fundamentally different than using it for code. It isn't. Both of these uses just output slop based off the stolen works of others.

You can always add further detail in the product description, but for many people - me included - the acceptable percentage of AI is zero.

I enjoyed reading your devlog!

Four games in 24 hours. Really?

You can just click on OP's username and check their game library yourself

My interpretation is that itch.io has tons of products that are just PDFs, WAV files, 3d models, whatever. When a download file is not marked with a target platform, it might be very hard to impossible if the thing even can run.

You might want to try and point the missing metadata out to the game devs themselves. Having correct metadata is in their best interest, after all.

In the meantime, you can just download the files through the web interface instead of the desktop app.

This is a spam bot. Do not interact with the service it promotes, because there is a good chance it is an outright scam.

I have reported the post to the mods, this comment is just a warning for people who see it in the meantime.

Whoever told you that is wrong. I have a build pipeline that I set up two years ago that uses butler for uploading games, and it works just fine. It always has just worked fine. Of course, it will break occasionally if itch.io itself has an outage, in which case you should retry later.

Because of that, it is not possible to fix your problem without the exact error message. butler uses HTTP and can run into every potential failure state that HTTP can run into, and I am not giving you an extended lecture on how HTTP works. Show me an error message, then I can try and help.

(Probably better to do that in its own thread than to bury it here, though.)

First time i've been called a bot by an AI slop developer.

This is very funny, please keep demonstrating your utter lack of professionalism. And if you want to know who I am, please check out my games. I put a lot of myself in there.

If you sell a product for money, people have the right to criticize the quality of your work, especially if that work is obviously deficient and has not been quality controlled at all.

That is not "aggressive", it is not unhealthy, that is necessary pushback that everybody who tries to rip consumers off needs to face. You are not entitled to being cheered on.

In this case, it clearly failed because the user was using an invalid API key. That's user error, not a sign of malfunctioning software.

If it is not working for you, you should probably describe your error and get help instead of vagueposting like this. I assure you that butler still works and would be happy to help troubleshooting.

No, I didn't download it because that would cost me $8, and I can already see that your work is AI slop from the screenshots. Judging a game by its screenshots is not a "fantasy", it is the normal process for making a purchase decision.

If you are so dead set on me playing your game, fork over a marketing copy and maybe I might - or I might find more signs of obvious carelessness and mock you for them, so choose carefully.

Your work isn't "high quality", it has a typo right on the marketing material. Your lies are obvious to everybody but yourself. Your AI slop does not have soul, nor does it have meaning. Those require creative effort, and you didn't even put effort into proofreading the material that is right on your landing page.

Make sure your game has a good description and good tags. Tags are important for discovering new games.

Make sure your game's thumbnail looks good, so people who see it while browsing tags actually click on it. Higher click-through rate = more visibility. Your current thumbnail looks AI-generated, which will turn many people off.

Find relevant communities online and promote your game there (with permission from moderators - nobody likes a spammer). Promote on socials.

Besides that, be patient and manage your expectations. Most jam games get relatively low view counts because, let's be honest, there's a lot of them, many are kind of mid due to the time constraints, and most of them just do not stand out in any way.

That AI disclosure was not there when I checked. (And I did check.)

Adding it after you were called out and then telling me to "learn to read" is pretty dang low. (At least I assume you wanted to tell me to "learn to read", not "learn to cheat"...)

And yeah, I am filling the world with my actual creative work. I'd say it's going pretty well.

I do appreciate transparency. Being honest is better than lying.

But the bottom line is you are still using a technology that devalues human creativity, puts artists out of work while stealing off them, and ultimately produces mediocre results. Being transparent about your use of that technology does not really absolve you of those things.

I know I can't really blame you for that choice since it was apparently mandated by your school but i still hope you think about this and consider working with artists, choosing media that do not require 2d art, or using stock art for future projects. They are more ethical choices and, in my opinion, result in better results.

No, I am not going to put money into an obvious AI grift on a platform with no refund policy just to make sure that it actually is an AI grift. I have no intention of supporting "developers" who sell obvious AI slop and lie to me about it.

Instead, why don't you try to write marketing copy that does not read like obvious ChatGPT output, and make sure that your screenshots and other promotional materials do not have obvious AI generation artifacts?

Like, just look at this: 

This is obvious AI slop. It was obviously AI generated and it was obviously not double-checked by a human being. It has obvious artifacts of AI generation and obvious mistakes. If you seriously try to explain to me that this is not AI, I will report you to itch.io for fraud, because you are not allowed to lie about a product that you are selling.

Even if this wasn't made by AI, it would still be slop. Charging money for this is outrageous.

"The story/code/gameplay design is entirely human-made. Only the visuals and some sounds are from AI."

The implication here is "my own art form (writing) is important and needs human creativity and deserves respect. Other art forms (digital art, sound design) can just be replaced with generative AI, no big deal."