itch.io

Hey Griffin! Would you like to give space themed ambiance and music a shot? I'd love to get in touch on discord if you're keen.

username: nodzi

This issue is one of the most annoying things to deal with when hosting a jam. I've bugged itch staff multiple times to add a filter that catches promotion spam. It should be simple enough to add something that checks if a game is being submitted to multiple jams, or even give jam hosts an option to only allow games that are submitted to no other jams. I can't help but feel that itch doesn't care about their own platform anymore.

Hi,

The judges rate the games during the rating period, meaning we've already sat together and gone over the entries. We will then combine those ratings with the itch results with a fair weighting system and communicate the top 5 entries on Monday! From there the top 5 games will be showcased and played / rated on the day of the conference which will determine the final winners.

In terms of the prizes, we're just waiting for final budget approvals but they will be communicated on the day of the conference when we announce the winners.

Hi there! Windows builds are more that welcome but the games will be judged on the web build. I do think that new uploads are locked though so you won't be able to update your game page until the voting ends :-)

Thank you for spotting that Tahnan. We've disqualified the submission after reviewing it :-)

Just had a look and I see you managed to get Gravity Run submitted :-)

Hi Uriah, that's odd. Sounds like an issue on itch's side. Please upload your game as a normal game to your itch page, then let me know here and I'll send you an upload url for the game.

Hey Kaank,

Just a reminder, your game needs to have a playable web build as per the rules.

We're currently hosting a game jam for our annual tech conference, and for the first time ever we opened it up to the public this year. We're grateful for the traction it has received, however we're also dealing with a lot of frustration in terms of spam submissions.

I've had to disqualify and report well over 10 submissions already for being spam games that are getting submitted to multiple jams. Would it be possible to introduce a limit as to how many jams a game can be submitted to? Theoretically you shouldn't even be allowed to submit a game to more than one jam, but it should be clear as day on the system that a game that's being submitted to 20 different jams is pure spam.

Really neat idea! Best of luck

Hi Christian,

Unfortunately the meeting was not recorded. But the important information covered is available on the overview page. Please shout if you have any questions!

Hi DarkSnow, this is the forum. Apologies, the wording is confusing.

Best of luck to all participants.

Hi! The theme has just been revealed. Please hang ten I'll quickly update the website

Prizes are not cash, but rather something of value. We can't reveal what they are yet but we'll make sure to ship them out to everyone, even if you can't attend in person.

Hi Bdot! Unfortunately not. You'll still get online tickets if you can't attend in person, and we'll set up and man the showcase booth for you. If you've won a prize your team will get their shoutout on the day and prizes will be sent to everyone no matter where they are located :-)

Hi Teezaboo, unfortunately teams have to consist of 2 - 4 people. Feel free to create a post on the community forum introducing yourself and asking for team mates. There are also quite a few threads already open with people looking for teams, including composers and artists so maybe reach out to them :-)

Hi Dark Snow,

There's no age restriction on attending the conference. We encourage people of all ages to learn and delve into the world of tech! If your team cannot make it to the conference in person but landed in the top 5 entries, we'll set up the display booth on your behalf! Best of luck :-)

Hi Dark Snow, the jam page will be updated and an announcement will be sent out to everyone that's already registered!

Building a browser version of your game with Unity has always proven to be a bit of a pain, especially when Unity tries to be a smarty pants with its own fullscreen button and it clashes with your canvas size in itch.io. Not to mention the default compression method doesn't work on itch.io. Below is a quick guide on how you can get your web version up and running, and looking good in the process!

Step one is to configure our compression method. Head on over to Build Settings:

After switching your platform to WebGL (This might take some time as it will recompile once you switch), go ahead and click "Player Settings":

Set the compression method under Publishing Settings to "Disabled":

Now head on over to Resolution and Presentation, and set your desired resolution to run the game at (Keep in mind this only applies to windowed mode, and if you enable switching to fullscreen in the browser which we'll cover later, it will run the game at the player's native resolution). Be sure to select the "Default" template too as the "Minimal" template does not come with a loading bar. We'll look into how to customize your loading bar and splash image in the next few steps:

You can now go ahead and make a build! Once the build is finished it should look something like this. Open up the index.html file in a text editor of your choice:

Delete the following lines of code. This will remove the built-in fullscreen button as it interferes with itch.io's fullscreen button. It will also get rid of the ugly "Made With Unity" footer that takes up part of the canvas and pushes your game out of view:

To customize the loading bars and the splash image that is displayed while your game is loading, you can modify the respective assets in the TemplateData folder:

We're ready to ship our game! Go ahead and compress the files into a zip folder:

Please make double sure that the "index.html" file is at the root of the zip folder, meaning that when you open the zip folder it should look like this:

Time to configure our game page! Once you've created a new game on itch.io, head on over to the "Edit Game" page and make sure the following settings are in order:

Remember to set the canvas size to match the canvas width and height we set up in our Build Settings earlier. If you want players to be able to play your game in fullscreen, select the tickbox shown below. If you're going to make use of this option, remember to ensure that your game and UI scales well with different resolutions and aspect ratios. The safest option is normally to force a windowed resolution and disable fullscreen if your game might not scale correctly:

Congratulations, your web build is ready to go!

Creating good assets is a difficult process, and takes a lot of practice to get right. However, if you don't have an artist or musician on your team don't fret! There are plenty of good resources out there that are available for free, and this post will show you how and where to find them, and what licensing agreements to look out for.

LICENSES AND MEANINGS:

When it comes to using pre-made assets, you'll need to keep your eyes peeled as to what licenses apply to the assets you're using. Below is a list of ones you'll commonly see:

- Public Domain / CC0: These you can use without any restrictions. No credit is required, and you can even claim it as your own and redistribute it.

- Attribution 3.0 / 4.0: These mean you can use them in any product, as long as you provide credit to the creator

- Royalty Free: This one is slightly confusing, because even though it has the word free in it - it just means that you don't need to share any royalties / revenue you make from the product. Most of the assets tagged as royalty free normally cost money to license, so these are pretty much out of the equation.

FONTS:

For fonts, the best site to use is https://www.dafont.com/. In order to make sure you only see fonts that you can make use of for free, you can apply these filters when searching: 

GRAPHICS:

For graphics there are numerous sites you can look at, but these ones are some of the most popular ones:

https://opengameart.org/

For Open Game Art, you'll have to check the licenses here for each asset individually. Please refer to the above LICENSE TYPE section to see what each license entails:

https://ambientcg.com/

Ambient CG offers a bunch of public domain textures. This means you can use any of the ones on the site without any credit to the creators.

https://www.3dmodelscc0.com/categories

3d Models CC0 is great to get hold of some decent 3d models. These are all public domain as well.

https://clara.io/library

Clara.io is also a great place for models, but keep in mind that the licensing differs for every model:

SOUNDS:

https://freesound.org/

Free sound requires an account, but offers high quality sounds that you can use. Remember to check the licensing however!

MUSIC:

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/

Odds are you've heard many of his songs before, especially on Youtube videos. Kevin Mcleod offers a wide range of royalty free, public domain music which you can use without any credit.

3D ANIMATIONS:

https://www.mixamo.com/

Adobe has really done game developers a solid here. Mixamo is an expansive library of AAA quality humanoid animations. Simply upload a 3d model, and watch the auto rigger go to work.

TIPS FOR USING PREMADE ASSETS:

One of the most important bits of a game is getting your assets to feel like they all fit together. This is rather hard to achieve if you're making use of a mixture of assets from different creators. Color palettes are super important for consistency, and with a bit of fiddling in an image editor of your choice, assets can be repurposed to align with a selected color palette. If you're looking for a good color palette, head on over to https://lospec.com/.

Art styles also need to match. If you're going for a pixel art game, rarely ever does vector art compliment it (Unless it's on the UI as it can often look rather stylish). If you're making a 3d game, make sure that all your assets are either low poly assets, voxel assets, or high detail assets (which I don't recommend as it's incredibly hard to find good high quality assets for free).

All announcements will be posted on the forum. Additionally, the important ones will be sent via email!

It really feels incredibly well made. Better than a lot of AAA horror games. It's just sad that it's so short in its current state. Can't wait to see more!

That first interaction with the small fry really caught me off guard. haven't laughed out loud from a game in a while.

I'm also a bit worried and confused. I did draw all the art, made the music, and wrote all the code. But making sound effects is not something everyone has access to. Hopefully sounds that we licensed during the jam is acceptable.

Oh man this one was complex lol. Great art style BTW!

This was hilarious! At first I was confused but once I figured out how to fight it was actually a really clever design.

Doesn't load for me. I'm getting a JS error :-(

I had a pretty hard time figuring this one out. Could you maybe help explain how it works?

Cheating on my diet, but now I can do it virtually and without consequences.

Alien mommy. 11/10

Super cool concept! Level 6 deceived me by making me think I had to alternate between the worlds to get through the walls, but clipping out of the walls is such a clever mechanic! Nice entry.

This game has so much potential for speedrunning! Love the idea

Cool spin on Luck Be A Landlord, except instead of trying to pay rent I'm trying to preserve my soul. Now that I think about it, paying your Landlord really does feel similar

This one's ridiculously fun! Nicely polished too

This one's ridiculously fun! Nicely polished too