itch.io

They're very popular, but no where near as bandwidth heavy as videos

Itch is not a media content hosting site, like youtube. You do not host videos on Itch. You might sell your indie movie here. But you do not upload your vlog here. Or a podcast.

An audiobook is not a primary media. One does not create the story in audio format. It's literally someone reading a book. An existing book.

Itch has 20000 items in the book category. I do not think, we need a category for < 100 items.

 https://itch.io/books/tag-audiobook

https://itch.io/books/tag-audio

But one might want to suggest to have a "suggested" tag for these. "suggested" tags are the tags that are in the list and will appear in auto-complete when typing a tag in the tag selector boxes.

I am curious to see games developed without a game engine, like mine. Is it possible to filter them?

No.

It's the thing how absence of evidence is not evidence of absense. You do not need to tag engines or identify them in meta info, and there is no autodetection.

There a few tags developers might have used, to brag about not using an engine. I think c and cpp are such tags. But strictly, a lot of pure html5 games might fall in this engine-less category. Unless you consider html5 to be the engine.

This is community support and not tech support. Read here https://itch.io/t/4120453/unofficial-search-and-indexing-faq

Updated games are sometimes delisted temporarily.

If your games are delisted for over a week, you might want to write to https://itch.io/support

they take care of all taxes plus VAT expenses. so you can sell a game from there without registering as a company.

I am not sure about that. What I could find, they will report your earnings to the irs. Which might make some things more convenient.

But this would not change any requirement to register as a company, or how it is handled if you do not have a company, yet earn income from selling things.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=self-employment+tax&ia=web

videogames are a work of art, that means taxes dont apply

Where did you get this nonsense?

Some countries have exemptions for churches. Or actual charity donations, not the type of "donation" that is seen on Itch. But income is always taxable. It does not matter, if what you sell is "art".

You should not direct kids here. Itch is not a safe place for kids. And not talking about horror or even nsfw games.

There is malware on the page, because projects are not curated by staff, and it can take over a week to recognise or remove such projects. Unsuspecting kids might download such "games" and get the family computer infected. Playing web games on Itch is safe though.

There is also many minors that use Itch to trash talk and have drama in comment sections.

If you look for "popular" "indie" games, browse Steam.

If you look for actual indie and hobby games, well, horror is popular on Itch, because of all the streamers playing horror games. So the first few pages on Itch will be ridden with horror games naturally.

So the best advice really is, to use a postive tag - if you use the popular sorting.

You could also just visit the front page itch.io

There is https://itch.io/games/new-and-popular/featured and https://itch.io/games/newest/fresh . Those lists are curated and should have a balanced mix of indie games.

There is also the recommendation section. And if your browse interesting tags, you might see a link to public collections that have this game. So those collections might be interesting to you.

But yes, you can filter away "horror" games with a bookmark. But this will not catch psychological-horror or gore or creepy or .... or unlesss the developer has also tagged horror.

Well, I disagree, that rpg games in general are addictive. I play lots of different games, and I do not have the feeling that they are in any way more or less addictive than other genres. The exception is of course mmorpgs.

I would not even say, that rpg games are inherently fun or good. One can put a lot of things into such a game, that will be appealing to some people. But some will be deterring. To pick three examples: grinding, turn-based combat, crafting.

With no grind at all, it's maybe not a rpg, but a visual novel in disguise. But hardcore jrpg grind is not for everyone either.

While there are action rpgs, turn based is the default. You need time to do the deciding. But there are different types of turn based. Much can be done by quality of life features there, but there are also aspects of familiarity, nostalgia and limits of the engine. Personally I find the combat system of rpg maker to be horrible. But I do like turn based combat in general.

Minecraft is the most sold, most popular game. Modification or creation of equipment is a logical extension of looting equipment and fits into the genre. But this does not say, that every game should have crafting mechanics, or that all people will like them. Some might cherish them, some might see them as a distraction. 

So, what's this then? How do we make the perfect rpg, that some would call addictive? Is it the middle ground for all the aspects you could think of? Just put every mechanic in, that a rpg could feature? Probably not. There are successful games that feature only very few mechanics. Some so few, that they are not even recogniseable as rpg. Like auto battlers. And even some idle games. Some forgo story and focus only on crafting or combat. Or exchange turn based for action combat. Some cater to a nieche topics or focus on story.

Maybe it helps, if we see a rpg game as a meal to cook. Adding all ingredients and spices will not taste good. And there are lots and lots of combinations that will taste good, but not to everyone. So, if your rpg needs crafting or a minigame, is the equvivalent of the question of adding salt or a side dish. Adding salt to ice cream is generally not a good idea, but there is still the flavor salted caramel. Adding too much salt is possible too. And adding a side dish of potatoes to a pizza might seem odd. And while I am talking about pizza: pineapples!

I agree the levelling in terms of mechanics is not roleplaying 

Oh, but it is part of the video game genre called rpg. It's just not in the name, as the name was not descriptive, but loaned from non video games.

Role Playing

Role-playing games let you assume the role of a protagonist, customizing their abilities, equipment, and appearances. Through exploration, dialogue, and strategic combat, players navigate worlds, uncover lore, complete missions, and level up their characters.

While that is not an authorative definition and an authorative definition is not really possible anyway, as labels like this can change their meaning, a walking simulator without abilities, equipment and some form of leveling, will be ... oh, I already named a possiblity: such an rpg would be called a walking simulator. Having an avatar run around and tell a story by playing the game, having choices and maybe puzzles is not enough.

One minor, sometimes bigger, part of rpgs is how to optimize your character build. It's just another way of giving the player something to decide. A crucial difference for rpg vs action game, is the separation of player skill vs character skill. If you play an action game, your own skills improve. If you play a rpg, your character's skills improve. Of course lots of games are some kind of mix of both.

I guess it's the immersion thing again. If you let players make decisions, it lets them be in the middle of things.

Is your premise that rpg games are usually addictive or is that a straight how-to question, like, how to make a (your) rpg addictive?

Because either way, rpg games are not addictive as such.

What's addictive is mmorpgs, gambling games and typically certain mobile games that are optimised to give a kick and retain player engagement.

Might you be really asking, what makes a rpg game a good rpg game? Or are you after the essence of what makes a game an rpg game. Because, let's be honest, leveling up your character is not really playing a role.

Rpg games are just emulating parts of table top role playing games and got their name from that. And there are ttrpg where you will not gain experience and will not have character levels. And  not everyone will like every ttrpg, just because it is an ttrpg. And different people will like ttrpg for different reasons.

I believe the main factor of rpgs is immersion. However you would achieve this. This can be by good story telling. Or by engaging the player with rewards for effort. Or simply by good game play. Even eye candy can help. Or music. Minigames. Side quests. Whatever. The bottome line would be, it should be entertaining and that usually entails being fun.

Did you use Add External file?

If you can't post/write the link there, maybe something is messing with the user interface. Some addon. Or your device. Maybe something obscure like your screen being too small.

No one claims, it is impossible to do. And a single filter was implemented in a day or so.

The problem is not the filtering logic itself, imho. That external site would break down, if it would receive the traffic Itch receives. You do not know the server load a search query causes and you do not know the difference in server load a negated search query causes in comparison. That you need to be logged in to be allowed to use the single exclude query, speaks volumes to me.

Itch's system under the hood is obviously optimimsed for overlapping positive filters. You can't simply overlap a negated filter with the same system. Not if you build nightly lists of those things, to prepare for the querys. They would probably have to build a (all-x) filter for all tags. And there are tags that have like 5 items. They did this for the no-ai tag.

You know what breaks down first, when Itch suffers yet another ddos attack? Browse filters with several tags.

I can simulate multiple tag exclusion on Itch. Client side. Takes a few minutes to set up, depending on the tags, and works flawless. But it does me no good. It's useless to reduce the clutter on the front pages. Oh, trivially, we could remove most games on page 1+2 with 2-3 negative tags. But is that what we need and want? Do we really want to look at "popular" games without a tag preference, but remove the actual popular games? There are far too many games for that. And the tags are just not good for negative filtering anyway.

Most people seem to care for the top pages, and what we need there is not a tag filter. It is an hide-this button. With filters you will visit next week again and the same clutter that was not cought in your filters will still be there. Plus you will filter away games that you might not have wanted to filter away. 

you know when it works?

It does not work, if you are logged out, if that is what you ment.

The particulars of how to do your taxes will depend on your country. Also, the circumstances of what business type you need to be. But if you sell things for a living, you are a business. Natural people can do this, but you might need a license. And typically there will be a threshold of yearly income where rules would change.

How does GameJolt handle this, if at all? 

There are no files in the download section. You need to put your links there, and not in the description.

Do not fixate on length or genre.

"worst" that could happen, that people would disagree about your tagging. If you have mini games, it is already questionable, if that really is a visual novel. You are not writing a book. You create a game. Make the game, make it till you are satisfied and then worry about what genre it is, would be my advice. You can also adjust your tags over time, while developing it.

Also, https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel/tag-short

It certainly does not help. But your game is probably just put on the manual review queue for one reason or another. Waiting times can be over a month.

That's not an idea. It's in the community rules. But you made this thread in the ideas section. Read https://itch.io/board/10023/questions-support where it is described.

Formally, your "idea" is already in place, but it usually needs reports for Itch to act and it can take quite some time for some reports.

I am not sure if you already do this, but a thing you can try to do, is variation of your cover image, with each of your updates.

The thing is, your game's title is not really saying much about the game. And neither is the current cover image. The only thing it shows, is your art style. That's not a bad thing to show, but think about it. You show a woman and have a game title that does not have meaning. It is probably a made up name. From that combination, I would assume, this is a female protagonist game, and the prot is named like the game.

Oh, and you still have no rpg tag, but write in the description, it is an rpg. If you are unsure about the tags, maybe ask your patrons, how they would tag the game. They know the game, and are players of such games, they are bound to have opinions about what tags would apply.

The monster girl tag was suggested, because you wrote this Yes, there will be non-human characters in the future

If you’ve done it correctly, you will not receive any response at all, not even an automated “[Request received]” message.

There will be a report received notification to the email adress provided in the report. Along with a confirmation ID that reads R-xxxxx. Instead of the Request received mail with a ticket number.

While this is community support and not tech support, you can include your ticket number of the oldest unresolved ticket here, to try expedited the matter.

Your thread topic is not what you complain about. Tag accuracy enforcement would be something completely different. It would be enforcing that rpg games qualify to be rpg games. And that action games be action games and so on. Which would be quite difficult, as most tags are rather vague and some even change meaning or are subjectively different.

Tag spamming / meta information spamming (the thing you mention are not tags, but meta information) is not allowed.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#do-not-use-unrelated-tags-or-cl...

The offending account actually risks a ban from the index. And from what I have seen, that would be overdue by the spam flood of projects alone. The way to report this, would be on some of the games with the report button, but an email to support should do the same.

The problem is, that Itch is slow to react to such things. It can take over a month easily. 

The account linking to pirated games is similar. The games themselves can be reported by the report button on the respective game. The account linking to them, would need to be reported by mail to support. I did not have a look, but yes, this could be a malware spreading attempt and the account linking to the pirated games might have been hacked or is a fake account.

I have opinions about the malware situation.

I also have seen people naively "reuploading" things. It is not allowed, even if no rights holder complains officially. It is against Itch's  terms of service.

(Oh, and they typcially would not answer you. They would just take action. In some cases, they might simply disagree with your reports. But in this case, it is obvious, that rules were broken. The classification spamming is obvious.)

You did not make the game public. Ok, wrong guess. If a game does not appear in the profile, that usually means it's not public. 

Taxes will have to be dealt with. Natural person or registered company does not matter. If you collect money, taxes are to be paid and you need to fill out a tax interview. Itch does not even handle this directly.

In practice, you release something, and then the platform decides whether to push it or not.

Itch does not push adult games. The only games they "push" are the games in https://itch.io/games/new-and-popular/featured , by the fact that they are in that list and in https://itch.io/games/newest/fresh by the same mechanism. And they do not put nsfw games in those lists. Those lists appear on the main site itch.io

Itch's philosphy, as read between the lines and in the lines on threads about the topic, is: developers need to do their own promotion. They do not even see being indexed as an essential feature.

If there is a certain influx of popularity, that can become a feedback loop to have games appear higher up in the popular sortings. If you search for adult + fantasy games, that's already only 960 games. That's 25 pages and fantasy is not even one of the distinguishing tags. Being in the first 10 pages might be benefitial. Monster girls only has 450 games, non adult games included. A player interested in games with monster girls can visit all 12 pages easily, so being in the lower half would not even matter much.

If you combine 2 or 3 interesting tags, you get to like 100-200 games and one can check them all out quickly in a day.

Either way the goal would be to convert the accidental browse-view into a visit. I believe there is even a statistic about that, called ctr.

But that's all about optimising this passive promotion that happens by accident (and make those accidents happen to your target audience, by chosing relevant tags ;-)

itch.io itself offers a major update devlog option. That is how I have been treating monthly releases.

That's ok. I only have issues with how Itch treats the recent/newest sorting in regards to that. They should just make 2 separate sortings. One by publishing date and one by update (with a cooldown). And not do this arbitrary devlog thing.

Maybe there are tricks I never found. 

As a hint, there are places where I did find videos of nsfw game's gameplay. And some of those videos were even uploaded by the developers.

But I honestly do not know how and where to promote games. This topic comes up rather often. Maybe there are tipps in those threads that can apply to your game as well. The real question would actually always be, how to do it cheaply. I have yet to read an easy solution for this. But then again, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it and everybody would be at square one again.

You have a patreon and seem to be doing this for a while. I do not know your audience, but maybe you might benefit from a discord. At least I see a lot of games with that combo. Patreon, Itch, Discord. You could poll your patrons, if they would be interested or be indifferent.

You have over 700 followers. I dare say, you are doing well enough. Considering the parts I am gonna criticise below.

One should not try to use "updates" and the very brief spike of being visible for 5 minutes. It is highly unreliable and if that is the only visibility mechanism you can get, you clearly need to overthink your marketing strategy.

My opinion on the devlog and the time stamp bump mechanism is, that it is overused and Itch should come up with something better. It is supposed to be major updates. You can't tell me, you have a major update every month. It is your scheduled update.

I was actually confused, why older games would appear at recent at all. I either expected a list sorted by publishing date, or somehow sorted by update date. But not this unreliable mix of publishing date and human staff approved devlogs. What about games that have updates without devlogs? It's an unfair concept at core. And is not what it says on the tin of "recent/newest".

Things you might want to consider (critique from a player's point of view)

Your game's description is too short. It is a whole two sentences. Two. Some of the screenshots seem to show interesting mechanics, but zero words about it in description.

Your tags are not good. Your main genre is visual novel, but nothing on screenshots says visual novel. This looks like an adventure game with some turn based combat mechanics and a party system. That you did that in renpy is even more interesting.

Do not tag visual novel, just because you used renpy. Is this a branching story where you only chose branches, or is this a game where you can free roam, have inventory, a combat mechanic, exploration and whatnot? 

Remove the no-ai tag. Itch finally shows the no-ai information in the info box. You do not need to waste a manual tag for that. And seriously, why are so many people tagging that manually. If they do that manually, why say what it is not, instead of highlighting the positive? If there is a positive, like in your case. https://itch.io/games/tag-hand-drawn 

You can ditch the male protagonist tag to free up another tag. If your protagnist is not female or a robot or something, no one will assume otherwise, especially if you have screenshots. Steam does not even have that tag, for perspective. On second thought, you might want to keep it, because of your cover image, to avoid confusion.

Two of those adult tags are redundant. You only need adult.

Should I be mistaken and your game actually be a visual novel, the story rich tag is redundant.

The 2D tag is also superfluous.

So, from your 1 genre and 10 tags, this makes only 3 that say anything useful about the game. Visual novel, adult and fantasy. And I disagree with the visual novel label. For the story rich tag, you show too much turn based combat screenshots.

In fewer words: your tags are bland and boring. But your game does not give the impression to be bland, generic and boring.

Reorder your screenshots. The two top ones will get shown in the hover popup when browsing. One of them should be the one with the fight with the wild boar or whatever that is. That looks interesting. But to browse your game, it should appear at more interesting tags, than the generic ones you use.

You even mentino rpg in your short description, but basically tag the opposite genre visual novel.

Some tags to consider (note, I have not played the game): sandbox, exploration, turn based combat, rpg, adventure, multiple endings, hand drawn, monster girls

You can look at your analytics, if people find your game via any of the boring tags. But right now, they sure will not come from exploration, rpg or hand drawn.

there is genuinely no reason not to have it

There were no reasons stated, as far as I know.

So it is all guesswork.

The simple reasons are of course, it costs money and will only benefit very few players. Steam has negative filtering and a very limited tag number. I never felt the need to use it there, apart from analytical experiments.

There are over a million games on Itch and negative filtering will not reduce that number much. Filtering away  80k horror games from 1.45 million will still give 1.37 million games. Filtering positive will do that much better. Do not want visual novels? Look for what you want. If you like platformer games, use that tag. There are not many platformer visual novel. Oh, and there are still 500 of those. Why did they tag visual novel? If it is a platformer game, it is not a visual novel. Just because it tells a story, does not make it a vn.

So maybe the main reason is, that tags are not accurate to begin with, to use them for negative filtering. Sure you could filter tags, and a single tag exclusion was implemented quite quickly. 8 years ago. Itch has 8 years of user statistics how and if people would use such a feature. 

It will not help you find games you like. But it would hinder you to find games you might have liked.

I picked a game rather randomly from the list of platformer visual novels.

https://intoadream.itch.io/into-a-dream

Tell me, would you consider this a visual novel? It would have disappeared from your browsing, if you would use a negative visual novel filter. 

there's a niche or two for VN's that aren't dating simulators

Visual novels are not dating simulators and dating simulators are not visual novels.

Dating simulators have a game play loop. They are actually more akin to a rpg. You typically have free roam and stat management. Inventory. Ressources. Your goal is just not to overthrow the big bad.

Visual novels are a branching story. On the extreme end there are kinetic novels, with no branching (basically a movie). There is complex visual novels, that almost have a game play loop, or hide the loop.

The concept is basically this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure and I assume, most or all those children books did not have romantic plots.

But since vn is about story, and stories about romance are very popular, of course a huge lot of vn will have that plot. And with a computer's capabilities, the genre often blurs into other genres, including rpg and dating sim. And of course a dating simulator with a few text dialogue boxes, will easily be labeld as visual novel, especially if you use a "vn engine" like renpy. But reading text in a computer game, does not make that game a visual novel. (And yes, I have even seen games be labeled point&click, because you had to click on things... I have opinions about tags ;-)

but I don't know where they lie

Anything that is exciting and anything that will get more exciting, if you can chose the branching. Adventure, fantasy, science fiction, road trips. Not stamp collecting. Although, there was this rather good stamping game, that had decision making and story telling, but not many would consider it a vn.

Since you tagged your game "action", maybe you are creating another type of game, and are only fixated on the visual novel label, because you used the renpy engine. A lot of games tell a story. And many games let you chose the outcome of the story in some way.

about three months ago

Your account is 52 days old. That is less than two months.

None of them are indexed or showing up in search and browse results.

https://itch.io/search?q=QWEIN+ZINE shows me 12 items that seem from your account.

I haven't received any reply to either of them.

Itch practically never answers indexing questions. 

If the platform doesn't support paid TTRPGs properly,

https://itch.io/physical-games/top-sellers

It does. And waiting for first time seller to get indexed is not unusual. And waiting for over a month is not unusual either.

Read here about indexing.  https://itch.io/t/4120453/unofficial-search-and-indexing-faq

And mind you, this is communit support and not tech support. You will usually not get official answers here.

You sure, there was no ai used for this game? Those images and styles look rather ai generated to me. If you obtainted those background images in an ai asset pack, you still need to answer the ai disclosure question with yes.

And don't use your own game's name as a tag. You might also want to specify the game language and reconsider if your game is on hold or not.

I should rewrite the description some day. 

I guess what most people really want, is to exclude horror games or visual-novels and all it takes for that, is a bookmark. No need to install anything or visit external sites. The usual complaint would be, that 90% of the top pages are horror and visual-novels, and thus people asked for tag exclusion.

But from my browsing experience on Itch, exluding tags is not actually gonna solve this. Or all the clutter appearing again and again at the same places you look every week. You also can't exclude your library or known games by tags.

So imho the better solution is this https://itch.io/t/1018893/a-never-show-me-this-again-please-button

And that's what the tampermonkey script does. You can mark&hide your whole library, any developers you dislike, and all games you already have seen, at the press of a button.

You could even actively search for a tag you dislike, and mark all the games. For experiments like this, I would recommend using the save and load functionality of the script. So yeah, one can emulate fully working multiple tag exclusion with that script. But why bother, if you can just weed out games occasionaly at the places you browse regularily.

My tampermoney recently gave me an update notification, that it would need permission to run user scripts. I checked my config, and it was already activated. You need to click details to show the additional config options, and there will even be the Itch domain listed as the domain this extension is allowed to do things. Maybe this permission is not activated on your browser or the Itch domain is missing ("https://itch.io/*").

I just tried it with Chrome 149.0.7827.54 and Tampermonkey 5.5.0. The tampermonkey icon will show a small (2) as soon as I visit an Itch page and both scripts still work.

the chrome extension can only exclude one tag at a time and it does it by adding the exclude header into the URL. Example: ?exclude=tg.visual-novel

Yes? That's what it is supposed to do. The tampermonkey scripts are happening user side. The exclusion is happening server side. See this thread https://itch.io/t/160014/can-i-use-exclusion-filters , where the exclusion filter was introduced.

All my extension does, is to give the feature a box to just enter visual-novel, instead of writing the whole thing in the url bar. And it makes this modification persistent. If you add or remove another tag, it will vanish otherwise. It will also stay beyond a browser restart.

I am fully aware that this is a community space and not official tech support

Sorry. A lot of threads here are made, that do not give the impression, that people realize this detail. 

The blue moderators are community moderators. They moderate the community we are talking in now. They do not have technical insights into the inner workings of Itch. Apart from having experience with the platform and things like "devlogs are manually approved" being knowledge that gets repeated a lot in threads like this one. It's even in the sticky

https://itch.io/t/4120453/unofficial-search-and-indexing-faq

"So how can I get back at the top of New Releases?"

See at the bottom of the Search & Browse FAQ. Short version: make a devlog post marked as Major Release or Update. It will be reviewed by itch.io staff, and if approved it will put your game back up there.

If that is 100% accurate under the hood is another question, but the effect is observeable as a user, if you happen to watch the recent pages for your favorite tags. It might or might not be, that some of the bigger games get a devlog appproved every month or every other month. And smaller games less often. And my guess is, new games are low priority, as they will be actual new for quite some time.

Since it is repeated so often and is observeable as a player, I was just curious where people would claim otherwise.

--

On the clutter in the name issue. If your game would get famous and people would seek it by name, Itch's actual search is literal title search. Any clutter will devalue the relevance of the words. But for now, people will discover it by tags. And if they look at recent on their favorite tags, it will appear for quite some time. So maybe doublecheck, if your tags are fitting for the platform. For example, you can ditch the indie tag - there are not really many non indie games on Itch. Just look what similar games use as tags.

From where did you get this information?

Devlog approval is manual. This means, there is no cooldown, no guarantee, no nothing.

And in my opinion, this feature should be overhauled. People act like every update is a major update. That's not what major update means, and only major updates should be a cause for a refreshment.

Just do your updates and do not bother with optimisation. Itch does not like it, if people try to game the system.

Also, try not to use version numbers and clutter in your game's title or url with the next update. Your game is not named "update", so why should it appear in the url. You can put such informaion into the short tagline appearing under a game's name, or just put it into the cover image. Imagine what happens, if people try to share a url of your game. 

(Also, this is community support and not tech support. You are not talking to Itch here and Itch is mostly not reading here.)

If anyone knows a way to convert dollars to BRL

You can try looking for a browser extension. Otherwise, do what most people would do. Estimate in your head or fire up a search engine and enter the amount. Also, there probably will be taxes on top.

(Mind you, you still have to pay in dollar and there will be additional fees, depending on the payment systems and where the currency conversion happens.)

If you do this on a phone, I am gonna assume that your web game runs as a web game on phones.

Is there a reason why you want a downloadable version of the game? Because with a web game you do not have to worry about target systems compatibility.

so someone suggested that I restrict the executables behind a code on the project page

What would that accomplish?

This is Itch. Just upload the experimental downloadable of your web game as a a downloadable file to your web game. And state clearly, that there was not much testing done.

But you do have a machine to test the executeable and give it a play, do you not? What type of unique issue are you expecting? Your playtime is stated as half an hour. Can't you play for half an hour and tell if your computer is on fire after that? Is that about the android export? Why do you need one? Does the game not run on browser on an android device?

Oh, and maybe do not make a devlog every day. It's pointless. Also, why do you add a file to the devlog, if you are having currently a web only game?

what do you mean by ‘big titles have neglected over the years’?  Fixing bugs?

One often forgets the differences between indie games and big and bigger game studios. You question about testing is in my opinion not really applicable for an indie game project at the solo dev and hobby level. You do not have a publisher. A dealine. A budget and an expected return value. No profit maximization. You do not need to calculate a return value for testing efforts. Will you sell more units, if you pay for testing a week longer and delay release? Will you lose customers and reputation, if you release a buggy game? 

As an inde dev you can just release the game as soon as you are comfortable with it. Or update whatever you think needs fixing.

In the early days, it was not possible to fix games. Not easily. If your game was on the physical medium, that was it. No way to fix bugs. Especially not on video game consoles. For desktop computers, you could release fixes and patches that people would be able to get on a cd when buying a game magazine. Or over the rare and slow internet, which would cost per minute. And that came even later for console video games.

The more easily you could fix a game after release, the sloppier publishers and developers got. Now there are games, you would not want to touch at all the first year after release, sometimes longer, because of the bug festival inside the game and to see if the developer would drop the game like a hot potatoe and leave customers out in the rain with a bug ridden mess that would never be fixed. 

"Early Access" helped here a bit. But it is just shifting goal posts. When is a game worthy of "released"? As soon as you can sell it, or as soon as the developer is proud and need not be ashamed of all the bugs?

There is two types of testing. You did not specify which you talk about.

Testing for bugs. Traditionally, you do tests yourself till you are satisfied and move from alpha test to beta test and if you are confident enough, from beta to release. But this is not a value, like let's search x hours for bugs. You just test the game in hopefully all scenarios and eliminate all the bugs you can find, before any scheduled release date. For bigger titles, that got sloppy over the years.

Testing for balance and how the game is liked by the target audience. If you have no balancing, the answer is obvious. But you should still collect feedback by honest testers. Your proverbial mom probably is not unbiased. And while friends might be honest with you, they might not be the target audience, or might not be able to pinpoint what is missing or too much. If you can release a demo and have an audience, that is an ongoing process, and the art is to hear the valid critique, even if there are vocal minority opinions.

Trivially, the only person needed is you, and the time needed for testing is 0, because it happened while the development was happening. The other end is what you said, about never enough. To draw a line, you would need to have some type of constraint. Like a release date. Since we are on Itch, that's not an issue. If it was about bugs, just have a few playthoughs been done, and if there are no game breaking bugs, it should be good to go and not be ashamed to have status "released" instead of "in development".

Then your update bumped your game onto the queue for staff to have a look. It can happen. And while on the queue, it is delisted.

If you have a webgame, people do not see the file name of your zip file that contains the web game. It is very odd to see a file name on a devlog on a project that does not have downloadble files. I would not be surprised, if that triggered the queuing.

https://itch.io/t/4120453/unofficial-search-and-indexing-faq

Look at your analytics. Do you have had any traffic coming from within Itch prior to the update? Like from https://itch.io/games/newest

Your game is currently not indexed. That can happen for a new release and after every update. Indexing can take longer than a month. So your game is either de-listed temporarily because of the update, or because of other reasons, or it was never indexed and is still in the queue for staff review.

Since your Itch site appears #2 for https://duckduckgo.com/?q=box+grinder+game&ia=web makes me think the game is temporarily de-listed for one reason or another.

The boost in visibility does not come from the devlog itself. You need a lot of followers for that. People see devlogs in their feed if they follow you. And randomly browsing in https://itch.io/devlogs is not a thing many people do. 

In theory, a major devlog can be staff approved, and that will bump your time stamp on the recent list. So you appear for a short time as a new game again. But a devlog after a month will not be plausible. It's just an update, and your game is not the game itself, but a demo. I would not approve such a devlog to be a major update, if I had any say in it.

Also in theory, your game might violate quality guidelines and be intentionally unindexed. https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-only-uploading-keys-or-li...

Oh, and it is strange, that I see the updated file in your devlog. You have a webgame. I should not see files in the devlog.