itch.io

Itch doesn't have any kind of direct messaging. There might be a contact email provided here, though.

Newly-uploaded GIFs are still not working for me either. I had to upload the images offsite to get my newest project page to work properly, a couple days ago, and the issue is still there. It's easy to check whether it's fixed yet just by trying to upload a new GIF within a post like this one.

Hi! I imprinted hard on the Zelda gameboy games as a kid, spent five years drawing for a fangame community, and now I sell sprites. Monster sprites, in this case.

There's 16 monsters in this set, and I gave them a lot of material to work with. Five (technically six counting the snake) are 8-directional; all but 4 have at least some alternate facing. They're all pretty different from each other so it's hard to talk about anything standard across all of them, just, it's a lot.

(Link!)

Okay, here's what I've got.

Go to https://siscalypsis.itch.io/character-pack-dx and use workaround as the password. For people who already own this pack at the base level, there should be a sale set up to get it for $6.

Hi! That's a guy, his animations are in the DX version. (There's separate $5.99 and $11.99 versions of the pack--this page gets into detail about what each version has.)

Itch's system around this is kinda wonky. (I think it requires you to pay the $11.99 in one go, not split it into two purchases, although I'm not confident on this.) I can try to figure out a workaround for people who've already bought the set at the lower price, and post another message here when I have something set up.

It's tricky. I like how aamatniekss handled it in Era of Fantasy, by giving shallow water the texture of the ground below it, and underwater chasm tiles that transition to water deep enough that you can't see the ground anymore. (I took a similar approach in my own set, Land and Sea, which is more gameboy-oriented.) But obviously this means you'll have to treat every single shallow water ground differently and think carefully about how you palette them; this isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.

https://itch.io/docs/legal/terms#10-unclaimed-earnings-in-publisher-accounts

How long has the money been sitting there? After a year, itch starts taking 10% of the balance each month until the balance reaches 0. So that might be what happened.

Well, a lot of animation is art and can't really be separated from it. (Not quite 100% of it, there's some aspects that are more about code, but code alone won't get you there.)

I'd say that having a fun game and grabbing people's attention in the first place are two related but distinct things. You don't need the best art to be successful, strictly speaking. (Undertale and Baba Is You spring to mind. But don't copy their art styles either, obviously.) And the best art isn't necessarily the most complicated art--a simple style that takes shortcuts can work if it's distinctive and cohesive.

It's hard to give a straight answer on this. There isn't a firm "if you do better than this than you will definitely be successful and otherwise you will flop" bar. But I'd generally assume that being better at art helps, most of the time.

Okay, so I'm gonna say up front, this is a hard problem. I have not marketed a successful game! I'm making snap shallow judgments here, and while they could be a useful insight into the reddit/youtube audience you're trying to reach, I don't claim to actually have the answers.

That said: what you've got is not very far along and clearly isn't a fun game yet. Nothing is really happening except some jumping and daintily taking out a pickaxe. The art and animations are very amateur. (There's a stronger correlation between good animation and good gameplay than people are consciously aware of--a good dash or jump or attack feels good.) The story premise is interesting, but only if you can write dialog well and actually tell a good story. Just describing it isn't enough.

Making a game by yourself is hard! It sucks to have to be good at everything. Being a solo dev gives you creative freedom, simplifies money concerns and means you don't have to navigate as many social interactions, but you won't get any marketing boost for being solo if the game can't stand on its own. There's over a million games on itch and more being made every day, and people want to play the best. They'll all have different preferences and different ideas of "best," but they aren't throwing darts at a board either. What is Beastbound doing so well in this video that people should give it a second glance?

Anyway, I don't think you should worry about marketing just yet. A lot of it is luck, but you have to get yourself into the right position first or luck won't matter.

(And just to be clear, I'm saying all of this through a marketing angle, because you asked. It's totally valid for that not to be your goal at all. There's nothing wrong with just making the game you want to make!)

the New Releases topic might be one of the biggest sources of traffic for a lot of games where the developer did no other marketing

I'm...not sure where you'd be getting this idea from? My experience is that I tend to pull a decent number of upvotes, enough not to immediately sink to the bottom, and that gets me maybe 3 or 4 click-throughs from my Release Announcements link. Fewer click-throughs than people who bothered to upvote it.

Posting there is harmless and you might as well do it, but I think you're massively overestimating how much of a difference it makes, and without upvotes I'd expect fewer people to even bother to check the forum in the first place. Besides, people would sink pretty quickly there either way--it looks like there's been 4 new release announcements right now in the past hour alone.

If you want the benefits of marketing, you have to do marketing, unfortunately.

Redonihunter is correct. The AI Generated and No AI tags, specifically, do not appear under More Information. Only tags that are manually added appear there, while AI Generated/No AI tags are keyed to a question that you have to answer when submitting a project and don't fall under that.

This is dumb and itch should fix it.

So this one's itch's fault, mostly. When you're setting up a project, it'll ask you whether it uses AI or not. There's indeed tags keyed to this (No AI and AI Generated), and if you're browsing you can filter by those tags, but they don't show on the project page. Any project with either of those tags on the page itself added it manually.

It's very dumb.

I'm not super enthusiastic about doing a whole back and forth here, sorry.

(First one is just the midframe.)

The midframe before she goes morph ball looks like a workable crouch to me, could you elaborate on what you're asking for?

Thanks!

Maybe? I don't want to make promises there. I do want to make a big update at some point, but 8-directional support for the NPCs is in "probably at least a few but not necessarily all 26 but I'll see how I feel when I get going" territory. (Getting diagonal/bow support onto all 6 PCs is at the top of my to-do list there, for what it's worth.)

It'll probably be a while before an update like that either way, though. I've got a lot of other ground outside of this set that I still want to cover.

I don't fully understand the question, but probably no.

The NPCs are all 4-directional. Three PCs have diagonal support, covering basic things like walking, attacking and swimming. None of the humans currently have idle animations distinct from that old-timey walk-in-place kind, diagonal or otherwise.

(This is assuming that kind of idle, and not the blinking/yawning after you leave the game alone too long kind. But I don't have those either.)

Holding down the alt key also temporarily switches you to the eyedropper, for as long as you've got it held down!

Replace Color is also really great, especially with a custom hotkey for quick access. It has dials and a preview option so you can see how the color is shifting in realtime. I like to start with the eyedropper to put the color I'm replacing on both the left and right buttons, with selection tools to make sure I'm not doing any collateral damage with the recolor, and then use it. (I think you'd be able to use Replace Color with a transparent right button for other parts of your technique, like quickly getting rid of the translucent bits of the overlay after merging, but I'm not 100% confident on how this works on colors with alpha channels.)

(That said--this doesn't really seem like a monster design tutorial  as it currently stands? I know that Final Fantasy and people on Pinterest have cool monsters, but do you have more tips on inventing your own?)

(I did wind up finishing that dungeon set, incidentally! You can find it here.)

(Link!)

This is a big dungeon-focused set with a very heavy emphasis on puzzles, gimmicks and execution challenges. It's designed to be, just, stupidly flexible. Let me know how I did!

Collections are also itch links, yeah. But they'll only show in your referrals if someone actually clicked through to your page through the collection, which isn't super common, especially in a private collection. I wouldn't worry about it, it's just funny trivia.

It's also worth noting that people don't need to actually own or play your game to add your stuff to a collection.

People can choose to make their collections public, and you can see when your work is in those ones. But yeah, private is private.

Funnily enough, you can sometimes glean information by the URLs people got to your page from. (You still can't click through and see the collection, though.) I know that at least one of my asset packs is in a collection titled Competitor, even if I will never know who my rival is.

I think I'd need more information to search properly, but itch knows you played it at least. You might be able to find it again just by scrolling through https://itch.io/library/things-to-rate ?