itch.io

What separates these two aside from money? 

Mainstream is about designing a game to appeal to a large audience. Instead of special interests or nieches.

Independence is over creative control - usually done by financial control. The one who pays, calls the shots, either directly, or indirectly. If your producer wants certain features in the game, that's called executive meddling, and about the surest sign, that a project is not indie.

So, there are indie mainstream games. And there are big studio nieche and special interest games. And none of those two attributes said anything at all yet about success or popularity of the games.

There is even a certain relativity to the context. On Itch, horror games are mainstream. And on mobile there are games that are considered mainstream, that you would rarely find on a desktop computer.

money you can buy just about anything

It might be more obvious how wrong that notion is, by looking at the movie sector. Is is more talked about than games. And the budgets are a lot higher and often known. You cannot buy success. You cannot spend money to make a flop movie into a non flop movie. The very definition of this is, that you get a return of investment to be considered successful. And you literally cannot buy that by spending more money. Oh, you can try and get lucky. Or fail even harder.

And one would think that those movie producers that throw hundreds of millions at a movie production would know what they are doing. Hiring the talents. Pay for marketing. Do everything by the book. And so on. And still, there are many, many flops or films that barely recovered costs.

The problem is, that the moderator of a game's comment section is the developer and Itch does not notify the developers that there are pending posts.

Most developers probably do not even know where to click to see those pending posts.

Arcade games are action games. It means that the player's manual skill is needed, and not only thinking and decision making . And that crazygames place is where I played the game.

and I'm not interested in sounds and music

But casual players are. Eye and ear candy help. It should make satisfying sounds when you slurp up the new liquid or whatever. Yes, I know, that's not what those pixels represent, but that's what it looks like.

Music helps too, and such things are used in arcade games for a reason. Even if you did not want to make an aracade game, it should make you think, that a platform chose that classification for your game. If you want to appeal to arcade players, good music and rewarding sounds will help.

I played several incremental games. And dexterous action, like in an arcade game, is not the key quality of those incremental games. And it has quite an impact how you direct your swarm. For mobile you might even consider splitting the swarm for touching at multiple points.

I do believe the game has roguelite, rpg, and survival elements

Care to elaborate why you think so?

It's not roguelite, it's an incremental arcade game. Incremental and roguelite only share the getting better by failing and resetting mechanic. On Steam you even tagged it Roguelike. That game is neither a roguelike, nor a roguelite. You have no permadeath for your run so it is not a roguelike. For a permadeath you need a character that will have other statst the next run. And you have no random runs where you can improve your character differently. You do not even have a character. Where is the power ups you can collect in a run? Where is the branching where you chose your path? Your game is more like a tower defense game. There are waves of swarms you have to defend against. 

It's not an rpg, because you have no protagonist. No inventory. No quests. No story. No dialogue. If you have elements of rpg in the game, I did not encounter them. Upgrading your swarm fleet is not the same as buying new armor for your hero. It's a basic mechanic of incremental games.

It's not survival, because you do not have scarce resources and a protagonist that could die in an environment. You have an incremental game. You heap in resources a plenty. And failing is part of the core game mechanic. There is no dread, no risk. Surival is a sub genre of horror or adjecant to it. Your game is rather the opposite of the survival genre.

You seem to plan more for the game, seeing how you intend it to feature multiplayer and a campaign. Maybe it will have some rpg like aspects in the future, but unless you create a framework of story around it, where the pixel fights is the fight mechanic inside it, I have doubts. 

I'm willing to make the necessary changes if anything is necessary, but if the Itch team won't give a clue, what am I supposed to do?

There are no necessary changes. And yes, any update can trigger a temporary delisting.

Basically ignore the indexing. People are not gonna search your game by name much and any traffic you direct here by direct link will not care about the indexing status of your game.

My 2 cents are, it would be wise to chose accurate tags. If you attract fans of the surivial rpg genre and they are disappointed, that's not a good thing. It might even be considered tag spamming. You might be better off with tagging it tower defense game because of the enemy waves. But an rpg that ain't at the moment. Same for surival and rogueanything.

I do not know how Itch classifies updates or what they consider for approval. But without actually comparing versions and playing them, they can look at the raw data. And in my opinion, "major" updates in a game so early in development are not really major, no matter what effort you think you put it.

If I were to make a filter, I would not even consider an update to recent in the first few months at all. You are still at the chronological place of a game 3 months old. Select a few characteristic tags and you appear on page 1 of recent on those tags.

Another thing to consider, the people that do frequent the recent section might do so regularly. And they will recognise the game, since it is futile to just aimlessly browse recent for all games. They will have made some tag selections.

For example, if you select ai graphics, visual novel and adult games, thats only about 20 pages - and those are very bland tags. An interested player can skim all those in a weekend and put interesting games in a collection for later view. If you appear on page 2 or on page 7 makes little difference in my opinion. And if Itch just approves all devlogs, the most recent pages will show the same games over and over again.

You do not want to appear on top of recent, you want to appear high in popular.

why my account or game got flagged in the first place

Itch will usually not talk about specifics. And being flagged in this case would probably just mean, it got put on the manual review waiting queue.  https://itch.io/t/4120453/unofficial-search-and-indexing-faq

And that can take weeks and longer.

 Do games just automatically get de-indexed after a while when they are not updated?

No.

A few words about your game. I disagree with the tags. That's not a role playing game, nor a survival game. It is not a roguelite nor is this pixel art. It's literal pixels. You have no avatar whose role you play, and said avatar is not in a survival situation.

That's an action game. You you would want music and sounds in such a game (look up those old Tempest arcaded games) and you would want to port that onto mobile devices. For the incremental genre, shorten your numbers, do not write 20000. The name is fine. Minimalistic game or not, your game description is rather short.

but idk how itchio is helping me to build a community

Itch is not doing such things. That's the point. For this to happen by merely existing on Itch you need a lot of luck and a very good game.

Do not expect wonders. Your game is very AI heavy and that's not popular. You are actually doing well. Could be worse, could be better.

As a side note please read this https://itch.io/t/2885012/tips-for-reducing-the-size-of-your-build Your game seems quite big for a version 0.2

why itchio doesn’t and just leave me at the bottom of the search.

You are at the top of search at #3 at the moment. But why would people search your game by name?

If you talk about tags, your game has zero characteristic tags. You use 6 tags to tell people it's an adult game. And the remaining tags tell it's a visual novel. So what do we know about the game by finding it in those tags?

Your description says this: Free-roaming and exploration and one of the screenshots shows the word quest. Are you sure, this is only the genre visual novel - or at all? Your passive discoverability might do better if you would use some interesting tags, instead of so many redundant tags. Why even tag renpy? You have that as meta information.

Anyway, what might be missing in this thread is this bit of information: major updates need "approval" to have your game featured in top of recent again. I guess we can assume that there is a filter that presorts the games maybe. But it is said that this approval is human approval. So someone has to hit an ok button to allow the time stamp update. And your game is only 3 months old. Updates are not major updates, they are updates.

Oh, and if you were to have some distinct tags, you would still appear in the top pages of those tags. Your game is only 3 months old.

This whole mechanic is dubious in my opinion. What about developers that update their game without a major update? There should be two "recent" sortings. Maybe three. And one of them should be by publishing date and be fixed. I was very surprised, when I learned that the recent sorting was neither a pure update sorting (which is easily abused without some cooldown to prevent spam), nor a publishing date sorting, but some unpredicteable mix of those two.

I can't be the only one with thoughts like this, right?

I do not think people understand what your thoughts actually are. I read the other thread and this, and I do not understand.

It is unclear if you talk about a hypthetical game you would create, or about a hypothetical game, you want to play. It's also unclear if you talk about one game or about several games.

Experiencing another era of a topic is certainly something people think about. Imagine a mathematician wanting to discuss things with the ancient philosophers that invented certain concepts. Or a music band imagining how it would have been to release their songs at the hight of popularity of their particular style.

If you want to make a game you certainly have it harder and easier, as you would have 20 years ago. It's easier because of all the modern tools like game engines and all the experience of other people you can rely on. And it is harder, because video games are a lot more popular and easier to create, so you face the danger of obscurity. Also people expect more of games than they did 20 years ago. What then would be a game, might now be considered a mini game.

My observation was and is, that some games use visual novel as a tag, despite not being a visual novel (opinions will vary). The worst I have seen in such mistaggings was a developer tagging a game as point&click, because you had to click things with the mouse. For visual novels, some tag it, just because they used the renpy engine or because it is a story rich game.

I made two tampermonkey scripts that might help you, if you are willing and able to use a browser extension that can run such scripts.

Since visual novel is a genre, it can be filtered trivially on client side. But only if the main genre was set as visual novel.

And the other script gives abililty to filter games and developers individually. This is handy to filter away the content of your library and all the games you have already examined. Should you visit the same places every week, that will de-clutter those pages far better and more efficient than a mere tag filter. And you do not even need to hide those games. You can give them a red border or make them greyscale or whatever you like.

inventory management

Ohhh, if that would scratch the itch, https://thejaspel.itch.io/backpack-hero , https://playwithfurcifer.itch.io/backpack-battles and for a game with story https://www.inklestudios.com/80days/

The first two are roguelikes in a way. But the key element of all three is to sort and optimize your inventory.

Very good. I asked this question several times over the years to people that loudly proclaimed it was a standard feature everyone had. None of those people has answered me.

Took me a while to figure out how GOG does this. If I had not known it should be there, I probably would not have known they can do it. Similar to how I only know about Steam having this feature only because of discussions here.

My guess is, that it has to do with the mechanics under the hood. Steam and GOG have very few tags. It's maybe 200, give or take. Managing negated tags might be easy or cheap or both. Plus I guess those tags are a lot more accurate, because the are curated somehow, so it is also a lot more usefull.

Compare to Itch with thousands of tags and no curation at all, and a catalogue much, much bigger. GOG has 12000 games. That's less than 1% of Itch's catalogue size. Steam has 240000 games.

When I last searched, I could not find that feature in game stores other than Steam. In a store like the Google Play Store you cannot even combine more than one tag, let alone exclude tags. Many other stores did not have tags as seen on Steam or Itch at all. And from what I could gather, the exclude option on GoG is a newish feature. I see comments from people wishing for this feature even in 2025, so maybe it is new or people did not recognise the possibility. (You need to click the open eye near a tag.)

In my opinion, if you upload a mobile game on Itch that has ads, it is a game that is so bad or violates some quality guidelines (like shovelware), that google would not accept it.

And all such games I have seen on Itch were crappy shovelware slop. Usually made with those cookie cutter template websites that promise non coders you can make a game with no experience. The adservices are already included. And a lot of those I only noticed because the developers whined about not having their shovelware slop being indexed right away.

Also in my opinion it is actually forbidden to upload such games to Itch without making it clear, that it is adware. Not telling people shifts a game from having ads to the category of malicious adware imho. On google you can see such things before downloading at a formal systematic level. Itch has no such facilities, because it is not an app store for mobile apps. You need to spell it out.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-obtrusive-advertisements-...

Any projects that contain malware, spyware or adware are prohibited and will be banned from our platform.

For people small indie teams who have released a free game, how do you decide whether to add ads or not?

A small indie team is a small game studio. You are not talking about a bunch of friends releasing a fun games for the fun of it, or are you?

A game studio will make the decision how to market and monetize a game way before release and not after release. It is a business. They need to pay their own wages. While you can do things without having a business plan, it is also a quick way to failure.

Anway, Itch is not a good platform to monetize games with ads, microtansactions, in app purchase and so on. It is not even the right platform for typical mobile games. The users here will be cautios about such things.

That has nothing to do with physical games, but with DRM

This.

And Itch already does a rather good job here. While they do not ban drm, it is so poorly supported, that you will find almost no games with drm here. There are some, but none come to mind. I see people asking for it occasionally, but it seems, it's always about games that many people would not even play if they were free.

drm hurts legitimate customers and it does not improve sales in such a way that it would recover the costs for said drm. It actually disourages people from buying, since a lot of people are aware of the drawbacks of drm. So a cost/benefit calculation is mostly wishful thinking.

Try knitting or maybe crocheting.

What you currently do is a manual thing. People usually do not have this as a hobby, since it is considered work. Actual work. You either get paid by the bank, supermarket or whatever your employer is. Or you might get a discount on the fee to transfer coin money into your account, if you would wrap it yourself. Such things.

Playing a game might not give you the satisfaction of keeping your hands occupied. There is no haptic, you need a concious effort, mostly visual. You might hear an audiobook or radio or hear the tv, while playing a game and there is even the idle genre.

But playing so while occupied otherwise is a bit different in my opinion. Games are actually made to keep both your attention and keep your hands busy. Especially any type of action game.

For games in general, if there is no new story, you can use any game to hear things while playing the game. It goes with knowing the game, that you can run it on low burn in your brain. Similar how most people can walk and talk at the same time.

If work or pseudo work in a game is relaxing for you, maybe you would like one of the many simulator games. https://itch.io/games/tag-working-simulator (I am not sure if the games I talk about are in this tag. Maybe they are not indie enough to be on Itch at all. There is a big market for these. I am talking about all those Truck and Farm and whatnot Simulator games. Amercian Truck Simulator has about 100000 Reviews on Steam.). If it is only about the lack of required focus, that might just be another word for casual games. https://itch.io/games/tag-casual

The thing is, video games usually are not made to be played while watching a show, but be played instead of watching a show.

You might like this very old game https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Donald+Duck%27s+Playground&ia=web (Watch a video of it. There is even coins in it, you need to handle.)

The buyer is given a download key for the whole project. That does not change, if the price of the project changes, or if files are changed. That means the buyer can download all regular files on that project.

The exception is individual priced files. Those are compared to the purchase amount to determine if they can be downloaded. 

Your mod is not called resident evil requiem enemy respawn it is called enemy respawn resident evil requiem. 

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+important+is+word+ordering+for+a+google+search+ter...

Try the name of your mod, or try adding the word mod after the "wrong" word order and the Itch page will appear. It appeared at #2 in my attempts.

The game is now indexed, btw.

Take the game critique with a grain of salt, knowing these things: I have outgrown old style rpg games. I dislike pixel art. I am not a fan of whatever genre that prototype is. Not sure how to call it. Action rpg or something. And I am not particularily fond of turtles; maybe it's the beady eyes or trauma from playing mario kart. Games I like include Baba Is You, Monster Train, Darkest Dungeon, Thea the Awakening and Backpack Hero, to name a few indie and smaller titles. So your finished game would most likely not be my cup of tea.

Your page is a huge improvement. You can almost get away with having no description because of the screenshots. And unlike the web export, the download version works. It's a bit huge for what it does, but that kind of optimization is another discussion.

All the bells and whistles and polishing is of course missing, but that's a prototype. That kind of game would do as a short jam game.

Perspective is odd. When the game finished, it zoomed out to some more interesting perspective while I was still able to walk around, so the engine could do it. It's a design choice, but I would not be happy with such a zoomed in view (then again, read above how I dislike such old style action rpg).

The shell mechanic was kinda pointless. But I did not experiment a lot with it. Running away as a concept, is far better than bunkering down and waiting for the enemy to give up. Which is the strategy of an actual turtle.

If I were such a fighter turtle, I probably would do things like retracting my head and ramming enemies. Or leap in the air, twist and land backside first on the enemy, bouncing back, flipping back and landing on my feet. I would call it the revenge slam. Revenge for all those turtles that have been jumped on in various games.

As a tech demo to tell your story, ok, but as a standalone game, meh. One can imagine a spectrum between action type games and thinking type games. Maybe even a third axis for story. Yeah, I am sticking with axis, like a 3d diagram. The theory goes, you need to cover a bit of volume to make a game interesting. And this is super hard, if you only put your game's point on one axis. Can be done of course. A book only has story and people buy those. People play racing games and that is mostly mechanics/action. And people like wordle and sudoku, which is only thinking. But imagine a story unfolding while you need to solve puzzles and even do some fighting. Games are a complex medium after all.

You can add things like music and eye candy as another dimension, or view the topic another way, like adding spices to  food. You typically need several of those or a very strong one, to have a tasty dish. (And it's possible to have too many spices. There's actually a name for that in software. Feature creep.)

Your prototype currently focuses on action mechanic and music. There is no thinking or puzzle solving involved. And the story is stop the evildoers. Collect some diamonds. I would need a lot of eye and ear candy and other bells and whistles to play such a game. But as I said, not my cup of tea.

Nah. You do not use the grammar I am familiar with. I get what you saying, at least I think so, but it just makes little sense. If you do not add nexus or mod plus a game name, your things are bound to not come up in search. Argueing about any lack of discoverablity because of this trivial fact is rather strange.

mod and enemy spawn will show you mods for the most popular game, Minecraft. While nexus will focus on mods on nexus, it will still show the most popular modded game there, which is Skyrim I guess.

Also, if I search Enemy Respawn Resident Evil Requiem, your things do show up, including the Itch page. So I do not understand the premise of your thread.

(Try searching in a private browser window when searching with google. Fresh cookies. Google might adjust your results based on your previous searches and rank certain things higher. The first page of results is not that long. Maybe the Itch page appears on page 2 or 3 for your search terms.)

I think there might be a language barrier somewhere in between us.

If you search for a thing like enemy respawn without context, the search engine will probably explain to you, what this is or list trending discussions about that. It is a common concept in games. As far as search terms go, it is as bland and generic as searching for

friendly fire

spawn camper

ability cooldown

I just checked. Still works. But I use ESR Firefox, if at all. It is a hassle to activate temporary addons on Firefox.

In case you tried to install the zip, that will not work. You need to hit the debug buttons or whatever it is called to load a temporary extension. You need to unpack the zip somewhere and navigate to the manifest json there and load that as a temporary extension. Maybe even activate rights for that extension. It's a hassle to do this every browser start. I would rather recommend a bookmark with the exclusion filters on FF.

As far as usefulness goes, the two tampermonkey scripts are better anyway and there is no need of this temporary extension things. But you do need an extension that cun run such scripts.

enemy RESPAWN Lonely-Visual brings your thing up first in search engines.

enemy and respawn are very common words.

I have no clue what you are talking about. Especially the conspiracy theory stuff. And doubly so, because your things do appear on google.

If your specific search terms do not make your things appear on Google's first results, that means that Google prioritizes other results for those search terms. There is a whole industry dealing with SEO and search engines have their own ways of not being manipulated.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lonely-visual+mods&t=opera&ia=web

#1 Your Itch account

#2 Your Nexus Mods

#3 A specif mod of your's on Itch

#4 Your Nexus again

#5 Youtube about your things

https://www.google.com/search?q=lonely-visual+mods

Above the results are videos about mods. Not your's.

#1 A specifc mod of your's on Itch

#2 Your Itch account.

#3 Nexus, but not you.

#4 Youtube about your things

#5 Redit (not related to you, I think about the mods on #3).

I have 33 reviews with a 4.64 average and over 2k views, but still not a single donation

That's because your ratings are mostly from fellow developers and not from typical players.

My drawing is so-so

If you can do animations, you can use still images from those animations, or use those as reference images. I suggest you read a few webcomics if you not already have. The general tone of your setting makes me think that you also might want to consider if there is the possibility of writing a children's book.

Most have a recurring panel format resulting in some sort of punchline each strip. Can result in a continous story.

Some I can recommend:

https://www.sandraandwoo.com/2000/01/01/welcome-to-sandra-and-woo/

Intersting for you, because at some point that author had released a point&click adventure game with characters of the story. But the comic was running for over a decade and that game was not the goal of the comic but rather some extended merchandise.

Also interesting for you, because that writer commissioned the pages to be drawn by an artist. I would not recommend this to you at the moment. That guy did not start writing, with publishing that comic out of the blue.

https://xkcd.com/

About the opposite of a story comic

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0001.html

An example how to make a comic if you can't draw.

https://superredundant.com/?comic=meet-the-gang

Classic punchline each page format. But there are also story arcs spanning hundreds of pages.

--

Having your own background music will certainly make a comic stand out. But the webcomic sector is as hard as the indie game sector. Very few comics are widely known. But it will train your story telling skills. Telling bits of story in a quest or in a few comic panels is both telling those story elements under a contraint.

And while I am not a fan of such "games", there are also Kinetic (Visual) Novels. Even with pixel art https://itch.io/games/tag-kinetic-novel/tag-pixel-art . That's bascically a comic on autoplay.

https://itch.io/search?q=TORIN+the+Turtle

Your stuff is generally indexed. However, your play turtle game is not. It might help, if the game would work. Right now, if staff would have a look to decide if they should index it or not, they would see a game not working quite well. Strictly speaking, it's about this https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-publishing-your-page-befo...

I can hear music and did not manage to get the graphics. Last time I got some graphics but the assest were constantly flickering with black rectangles. I use current Chrome which is supposed to be about the most compatible browser, so I would assume that this is not purely on my end.

Are you talking about animated gifs? There is a config option to not play gifs automatically in the Itch profile settings.

Do not hire coders for custom software in the hopes that you can sell the software. That applies to games as well. Especially to games. This is high risk business. Professional game studios go out of business all the time and those people knew what they were doing. Even if you were to give a game studio a million bucks, they would not be able to guarantee you, that they could make a game that would break even. You can't buy success that easily. Sure, you could poor another million into advertisement. Maybe you even make a million back and only lose the other million. 

Even if you would get a good game for an affordable sum, this would not guarantee that the game would sell. And even if it would have customers, there is no guarantee that it would pay for the investment. I have seen games published here that were also on Steam and had barely a single review. I doubt that they even made the 100 bucks that Steam asks upfront as a barrier fee.

Anyway, it sounds to me, like you have all the ingredients and a lot more than most devs have I  can compose music, model and animate 3D, and direct the art of the game, but that's about it.

Coding is not that hard. It's easier to learn to code, than it is to learn the arts. You need talent for art. Coding is just following rules and rules about rules and writing rules down for a stupid machine to follow those rules. And a lot of redoing what other people already did. The hard part of making a game, apart from making the game, is designing it, so it is fun. Fun for other people to play.

Running around and eating fruits and changing your shell does not sound like fun. But running around and collecting coins and hopping on shells does not really sound like fun either. So your character has a gimmick. Most characters do. And your hero sets out to save the world. That story has been told countless times and in countless ways. You have neither novelty nor nostalgia to help here.

If you aim for a 2d game in the style your prototype was, you basically need only a cookie cutter template of such games. There ought to be tutorials that will end up in such a game. And you have all the important things like assets. I believe you use gamemaker. https://gamemaker.io/en/tutorials/how-to-make-an-rpg

Should coding really not be your thing, the idea with the comic is good. Publishing web comics is rather cheap and therefore low risk. Or you could animate shorts and release videos. Get a feel how to tell the story, so it is interesting. Because as I said, that story has been told so many times. People get bored easily. It should be entertaining in some way. And achieving that is very difficult.

If you work an a story, that might be interesting.

But I do not understand how you would spend money on your game to improve it. Unless you would need to pay a coder to do it for you. Most people here a developers in the sense that they would code their own game. And that only takes time and not money. It is a hobby for most here.

The prototype is basically not playable on Chrome. After ages it seemed to have loaded and all the assets were black rectangles that sometimes flashed to be a tree or a rock. I could walk around and eat fruits and that was it. There was no story in the game.

You are a musician, so you probably know best how many notes you can copy or have similar to another song and be ok. I do recognise that the mana song is a bit different, but I also recognise that some sequences sound rather the same.

I have doubts. Slop just means low quality or effort, or even waste. And it has a lot of meanings outside of software reinforcing that meaning. Not the least sloppy. Slop even is a dish. It was always a derogatory term for all sorts of things.

In some languages they seem to have used slop as a term for ai slop as a loan word. Who knows how that term will evolve in those languages.

Speaking of words, it's been a while since I heard the term shovelware. Something I would currently call slop.

Sigh. What you do here is reading things into words that were not said. You bascially do a sort of false strawman. You misrepresent a position by using a similar other position and then attack that other position. Like exchanging generated by with contributed. Or assisted.

The word assisted was never used in the ai disclosure and not in the discussions going on here, except by users.

leafo responded to a question where ai was used in an assitive manner, but clarified that this would not be the generative usage. What more do you need?

(1) So, if I use ChatGPT to debug and help me with code, do I also need to include a tag indicating it was made with AI?

You’re going to have to use your best judgment here. If you asked ChatGPT a question about something solely to inform yourself, then it sounds like your project doesn’t (2) contain content from generative AI. If you used ChatGPT to generate (3) some code that you then inserted into your project, then I think it’s fair to say your project does contain content from generative AI.

(1) Debugging is a way of assisting.

(2) Indirect way = not content

(3) Direct way = containts content by generative ai

So yeah, using "ai assisted" as the name for the meta filter was a very confusing choice of words. It does not reflect what people can read into that word, and what the ai disclosure intends to reflect.

To paraphrase. Use your best judgement.

You are a coder. You should be capable of recognising if you use ai code or not.

And if you are one of those "vibe coders", yeah, that's ai coding at the fullest.

Prompting search to give you the textbook example of a function you want to use and adapting that result in your code, is not, imho, even if the result was generated by an ai. But if you ask the ai to write the functions with your parameters and copy the result, it is.

AI does not make a game slop. It's the human that releases a slop game. And there are plenty of human made slop games too. It's just that the slop game creators can make a lot of these with ai in a short time. Itch is self publishing which means that there is no publisher that would block low effort slop. In theory the quality guidelines would deny indexing for slop. But distinguishing an amateur game from professional slop ain't easy.

Is it possible to monetize again yet?

Someone please correct me if I am mistaken. But monetization is not the problem, but visibility.

Adult games are not blocked from being bought here. But they are currently not indexed in general.

The recommendation of https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-content is to have a free game for visibility.

And even before this mess, a usual approach of many adult devs would be to have a patreon or other ways of accepting money.

Staff does not talk about internal things in general so they would not talk about this either, unless there would be something concrete to tell. So it is still unresolved.

You are making a distinction that does not exist, between “generated” and “contributed”.

No, you are trying to make them the same. Generated is a subset of contributed. Things that are generated are always also contributed. But not the other way round. You can contribute without generating. Equating them is a formal fallacy.

And the ai disclosure specifically asks about generated content. Not about contributions or assistance.

Inspiration is not contribution.

It is. You seem to make a distinction by agency or some other arbitrary criteria. Agency is not necessary. Relevance is. Without that specific inspiration, the work would be a different work.

So what about creating a character by ai? The characters traits, background story and so on.

The idea of the character is obviously ai generated. But does it fit the question for content produced by? If you copy things word by word, it would fit the text category. If you only use general behaviour and create your own interpretation of that character, no. But it would fit a contributed/inspired by classification.

What if you used an ai to give you a plot summary of a book. But you would write the book yourself? Is that AI content?

Interestingly enough, searching for this question tells me, that this is supposed to be "ai assisted" instead of "ai generated". And the irony is, that Itch specifically asks for "ai generated", but a year later mapped the ai-generated tag to something called ai-assisted. Much to the confusion of players and developers alike.

Assisted is much too vague to be of use as a label. And about the true intent, I can only recommend reading this thread again, especially the answers from leafo, how certain things are to be regarded. 

If you learn coding by asking ai and pester it about your coding problems, the game you create would be ai assisted. But it only contains ai code, if you actually put generated code into it. That's what I read from here https://itch.io/post/11423405

That was fake news.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghibli+ai+cease+and+desist&ia=web

Someone faked cease and desist letters in 2025. We live in the age of misinformation.

There seems to be a misunderstanding.

The point I was arguing is: filtering the results by exlusion tags is hard work for the server, and might be part of the reason why there is no multiple tag exclusion.

I supported this claim with the observation that one can make, while Itch is under attack by a ddos. Before Itch introduced this cloudflare protection, there were many, many ddos attacks, where you could observe this.

And the observation was, that the first things that fail, are longer tag combinations. Combining two tags might work, asking for four tags might not.

This was only speculation about plausible reasons why this filtering feature is missing and only exists as an undocumented and incomplete feature. I do not think it is the only or even the main reason. But such a thing will certainly influence a cost/benefit calculation.

quite literally what AI disclosure is about. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the graphics

No. AI disclosure is about tagging, specifically tagging the assets in a game if they are the output of a gen ai system. Which would include parts of an asset and does not exclude hand edited things. A hand drawn picture where you add an item in the background with photoshop ai filler would also qualify.

And what is literally asked is this:

Please disclose if this project contains content produced by generative AI tools such as LLMs, ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc., even if you hand-edited it.

What kind of AI generated content is used?

Classification of AI-Generated content is mandatory. Your classification will be used to add additional filtering tags to your project.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#ai-disclosure

We ask that you accurately tag your project if it contains materials produced by generative AI by utilizing the AI Disclosure section on your project’s edit page.

And no, in some way contributed is not the same as produced by. If that is your premise, your premise is wrong.

Also, please do not read any meaning into "ai assisted". That term has no separate meaning in the tagging system. If Itch wants it to have a seperate meaning, they need to clarify it to developers in the ai disclosure, and more importantly, make it clear to players what it means. I voiced concerns about the "assisted" phraising somehwere above. What it actually is, it's the mapping to the virtual tag  https://itch.io/games/tag-ai-generated . And the tag is given, if you answered yes in the disclosure question and the disclosure question continues to tell you that it is mandatory to check the classifications.

So it only means that your game would contain one or more of graphics, sounds, text/dialogue or code, that is the output of those generative ai systems. Nothing more, nothing less. What it does not mean is: in some way contribued, influenced, inspired or other things that could be considered causal or adjacent.

As an analogy, children are produced by parents. If you were matchmaker of those people, you contributed to the parenthood. But you would not be credited on the birth certificate of the children.

It’s a playable level, not just something to look at.

Did you geneate that level with a visual generative ai system, then tag the game as having ai graphics. Did you generate the description of the level in a text generator, than tag text or code or both.

Did you generate the audio description of the audio level with ai, then tag ai sounds. Did you generate the description of that level with text ai but made the sounds some other way, you might get away with not tagging sound, but you still have something to generate the sounds on the fly. So you will have text or code.

Haptics is an interesting bit, but I would default it to code or text. If we one day have those actual virtual reality things were you can plug in, there might be additional categories beyond graphics and sound.

If the ai gave you general guidance on how to do this audio level and explained details to you, even gave you the idea of doing it by pure sound, instead of visuals, then there is nothing to tag. The ai did contribute to the game, but did not generate any game content. 

Context matters. Perspective matters. Semantics matter. You can subjectively think about things in several ways, depending on how you chose those things. You only call it a level, because you consider it a separate entity. Other people would call the actual "level" to be the idea to fight a certain army at this time of the game under specific conditions. They might not consider the playing area as the level, but simply as the playing area.

Maybe this is a language thing. I am not English native speaker and from what I could find, neither are you. Unfortunately, the wordings Itch uses are at many places vague and ambigous. That's not specific to this ai disclosure. My favorite example is the "Select a tag" box. It fails to mention that you can write a tag in there and since you can click it as a dropdown box, that's easy to miss.

Also read here https://itch.io/post/11423405 what leafo had to say about this.

You’re going to have to use your best judgment here. If you asked ChatGPT a question about something solely to inform yourself, then it sounds like your project doesn’t contain content from generative AI. If you used ChatGPT to generate some code that you then inserted into your project, then I think it’s fair to say your project does contain content from generative AI.