itch.io

This is my most popular game. 1.100 views. It's been up for a very long time. The spike is me posting about it on Reddit 5 days ago. And tomorrow it is dead again. The platform itself builds zero traffic in spite of a monumental effort. So, in other words sharing a game on Itch, is it just storage? 

I have gained 16000 views (mostly from reddit), released 31 games and a few apps, but my work never has been featured on Itch. Not even once. So, what does it take to be featured?

https://tintwotin.itch.io/provisional

In a world where one can quickly be found guilty of thinking or saying the wrong thing, perhaps it’s time for an update of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In a creative process much like directing a film, I have developed a game adaptation of the novel, set in a contemporary society. Your choices determine how you navigate, endure, or defy a system designed to break you.

The game was created in the Kinexus game editor: https://tintwotin.itch.io/kinexus

An over the top game-trailer inspired of the story:

When did you actually last read Homer’s Odyssey? 😅 It’s quite a challenge - after all, the poem is about 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter.

But hey, as a bit of free public service, I’ve now made a game adaptation of the entire work (in a shortened and interactive version). All you have to do to begin the journey is click the link, and you’re off… https://tintwotin.itch.io/the-odyssey

So - who will be the first to post a screenshot of the final scene? In other words, who will be the first to get Odysseus safely back into the arms of his wife?

https://tintwotin.itch.io/journey-by-moonlight

A kinetic adaptation of Antal Szerb's masterpiece novel, focusing on the internal conflict between bourgeois conformity and the nostalgic death-wish. This game is not for kids!

Ever feel like your life is just content waiting to be created? Or a series of data points in need of optimization? Welcome to GenZ, a darkly comedic story where modern love gets the ultimate user experience test.

Play as Chloe, an influencer whose quest for "authenticity" is her brand, or Julian, a tech addict who wants to bio-hack his way to the perfect relationship. Their romance is a battlefield of competing algorithms: his for peak efficiency, hers for peak engagement. From fertility alerts that kill the mood to anniversary dinners chosen for their "geotagged aesthetic," every moment is a choice.

Will you lean into the performance and curate the perfect life, even if it feels hollow? Or will you risk a system crash for a chance at something real?

GenZ is an  uncomfortably relatable look at who we become when we're always online. Your choices determine whether this co-authored story ends in a synergistic merger, a catastrophic spinoff, or a reboot into something genuinely human.

Play: https://tintwotin.itch.io/genz

GenZ is  game created in my free game editor, Kinexus: https://tintwotin.itch.io/kinexus

More games authored in Kinexus: https://itch.io/c/6268695/interactive-cinematic-fiction-created-in-kinexus

Yeah, those branches which are way off the original story are a bit underdeveloped. I hope you had a good experience even so. Thanks for trying it out. 

There are some ideas you probably ought to avoid, but when you suffer from an endless creative urge, you simply have to try them out (otherwise they just sit there and make noise). This particular idea came to me when I stumbled across a thread where someone had taken the trouble to share four AI-generated illustrations for Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (you know, the story about a man who wakes up as a cockroach).

That sparked 250 red-hot comments claiming it was AI slop and that Kafka would never have approved of those images. It made me think that perhaps, in many people’s eyes, AI is just as unpleasant as cockroaches—and that if Kafka were writing his story today, it might instead be about a man who wakes up to discover he has turned into AI slop.

In other words, here is yet another free novel-to-game adaptation from yours truly.

Pitch: Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, a high-level executive, awakes to find himself transformed into AI Slop: https://tintwotin.itch.io/meta-morphosis

@godzilla145z Thank you very much for your comment - a lot of good ideas. I've tried to implement all of them. I'm a bit unsure about the checkpoints (restarting the game at the current checkpoint), because that demands many more levels which are fun playing - and since the levels are procedural - the math(speeds) - will make the game impossible to beat - and stretching the new elements out on more levels can potentially make the game more boring in the beginning - so there is definitely a trade-off - and I'm not sure I have found the sweet-spot yet. Anyway, thank you. I hope the game in general works better for you now.  

https://tintwotin.itch.io/think-hard-connect-four-in-3d
QUBE is an immersive, 3D strategy game that reimagines the classic four-in-a-row concept within a 4x4x4 cube. Challenge an AI opponent in a sleek, neon-drenched environment. Victory requires thinking in three dimensions to outmaneuver your friend or the computer and be the first to align four pieces. Updated with P2P multiplayer via computers. 

https://tintwotin.itch.io/echoes-of-a-life

Updated with better balancing and more levels/cards.

Echoes of a Life is a poignant, narrative-driven puzzle game. It combines the strategic depth of a "match-three" puzzle with a powerful, real-life theme: the fight to hold onto memories against the encroaching fog of dementia.

I’ve been exploring making small game adaptations of classic novels in the public domain, mostly as an experiment: what happens if games are treated as an introduction to classic literature rather than a substitute for it?

I’m not trying to argue that games are “better” than books, or that they can replace reading. The question I’m interested in is whether interactive adaptations can make themes, structures, or conflicts in these novels more approachable—especially for people who might never pick up the originals on their own.

Some of the adaptations are fairly faithful; others are deliberately shifted into modern settings. That’s not about updating or correcting the texts, but about testing what carries over. If a story’s ideas still make sense when moved in time or form, that says something; if they don’t, that’s interesting too.

All of these are short, free, and based on public-domain works. They’re meant to be tried, not taken as definitive interpretations. Ideally, they point back toward the original books—but whether they do that in practice is something I’d rather let players decide for themselves.

So far, I’ve adapted:

• It Can’t Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis (claymation universe)
• Twenty-Thirty - a modernized take on Orwell’s 1984
• Heart of Darkness - set in a contemporary neo-colonial Congo
• Kaspar Hauser - based on historical writings
• Azrael’s Manuscript - Strindberg diaries and plays
• The Man Who Thought Things - Valdemar Holst (forgotten gothic novel)
• The Fall of the King - Johannes V. Jensen and the Stockholm Bloodbath
• Provisional - Kafka’s The Trial in a near-future dystopia
• Faust: Director’s Cut - Goethe reframed around AI and authorship
• The Fire - Dostoevsky’s Demons set in present-day New Mexico

They’re all free to try here:
https://itch.io/c/6686419/gamified-classic-novels

I’m interested in how this comes across to people who care about classic literature—whether this kind of adaptation feels like an invitation, a distraction, or something else entirely.

So, is this editor intuitive enough to use? If you're into making interactive fiction games, what's lacking for you in using it to make games?

https://tintwotin.itch.io/kinexus

Open Kinexus

(Use the Chrome browser)

Kinexus is an editor for Cinematic Interactive Fiction & Visual Novels. It is a powerful tool for creating, styling, and exporting choice-based narrative games, interactive fiction, and interactive visual and graphic novels. It runs entirely in your web browser, providing a complete workflow from writing your story to packaging a distributable ZIP file for itch.io

Games: Game Collection

Discord: Invite

Github: The Code

Features

Visual Story Creation:

• A rich text editor for writing your narrative.
• Easily add, edit, and link choices between scenes.

Interactive Story Map:

• A collapsible tree view provides a clear visualization of your story's branches.
• Status icons instantly show the start scene, dead ends, orphan scenes, and which scenes have images or audio.
• Safely rename scenes with automatic link updating across all choices.
• Search and filter your scenes to quickly find what you need.

Live Player & Preview:

• Instantly playtest your game from the start or the current scene using the built-in player.
• Launch a full, clean preview of your project in a new browser tab at any time.
• Modern Player UI: The exported game features a clean, overlay-based UI with quick access to menu, sound toggle, and exit functions, ensuring an immersive experience.

Integrated Asset Management:

• Select image and audio files from your computer using a file picker or by dragging and dropping them directly onto the input fields.
• The studio automatically copies them into your project folder on save, ensuring all asset paths are correct and ready for export.

Powerful Style Editor:

• Customize the visual theme of your game, including layout, colors, fonts, padding, background images, and even global background music. Your custom style is saved with the project.

One-Click Export:

• Export your complete, playable project as a self-contained .zip file. This bundle includes the game, your custom theme, and all required assets, ready to be shared or hosted.
• The exported game is optimized for both desktop and mobile browsers.

Single-File, Zero Installation:

• The entire studio is a single .html file. It runs directly in your browser with no installation, servers, or dependencies required.

Local-First Project Management:

• Works directly with folders on your computer via the File System Access API. Your project, including the story file and all assets, is saved locally, not in the cloud. The app tracks unsaved changes to prevent data loss.

https://tintwotin.itch.io/it-cant-happen-here

This game is inspired by the novel "It Can't Happen Here" (1935) by Sinclair Lewis.

It is about a populist demagogue who wins the U.S. presidency and gradually turns America into a fascist dictatorship.

1936: A populist demagogue wins the U.S. presidency and gradually turns America into a fascist dictatorship.
https://tintwotin.itch.io/it-cant-happen-here
This game is inspired by the novel "It Can't Happen Here" (1935) by Sinclair Lewis.

Nineteen Eighty-Four updated to TWENTY-THIRTY:

https://tintwotin.itch.io/twenty-thirty

An interactive industrial noir. As a geotechnical engineer haunted by past failures, you discover a fatal flaw in a massive offshore energy platform. The storm is coming, and so is the truth.

Play: https://tintwotin.itch.io/the-caisson

More interactive  cinematic fiction games: https://itch.io/c/6268695/interactive-cinematic-fiction-created-in-kinexus

The trouble is that most browsers will not allow pages to download/create folder/files and without this, Kinexus will not work. I haven't tested all browsers, so other browsers may work, I just know Chrome does work. 

How far would you go to save your child? What would you sacrifice? Your home? Your integrity? Your soul?

Katharismós is a grim, dual-campaign interactive tragedy about two families on opposite sides of a miracle cure. When a revolutionary drug emerges that could save their dying children, a desperate father and a ruthless CEO are set on a collision course where the price of survival is measured in impossible choices.

https://tintwotin.itch.io/katharismos

Another problem is that new games gets buried on Itch a couple of hours after the release. The platform gives  priority to paid games, and let's everything else die in silence, no matter the amount of traction of a new free release gets.  I don't know about the numbers, so I don't know if this is a solid fact, but this is how things look. 

@DarkBloodbane Yeah, that's what has been keeping me going so far, but  I can feel that it's not an endless resource. 

By now, I've released 19 games and one game editor. On every release I post everywhere about the new game, I'm giving away for free (ex. Reddit, YouTube, X, Discord etc.). That usually results in an attention spike (200-400 views and 20-50 plays). But it only lasts a few days, before the total traffic again flatlines at zero. So, instead of creating a feeling of building a great collection of games which will have a basic flux of players, it feels more like throwing just another game in the dumpster. So, it is what it is, but my question is: how do you keep motivated to do more games in a situation like this?

If you need a simple editor for branching stories, I've done one. You can use it here for free: https://tintwotin.itch.io/kinexus

For dialogue-based games there might be better editors out there - more visual-novel friendly - where the character speaking is exposed - when speaking. 

Play the game here: https://tintwotin.itch.io/kaspar-hauser-the-soul-murdered

An interactive historical fiction based on the life of Kaspar Hauser. Your choices determine his fate and the nature of his soul.

Kaspar Hauser (30 April 1812 – 17 December 1833) was a German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell. His claims, and his subsequent death from a stab wound, sparked much debate and controversy both in Nuremberg and abroad. Theories propounded at the time identified Hauser as a member of the grand House of Baden, hidden away because of dynastic intrigue. However, there were also allegations that Hauser was an impostor.

The game was authored in Kinexus: https://tintwotin.itch.io/kinexus

Thank you!

You are an Auditor for Aether Corp. Your mission: Certify the miracle mine deep in the Congo. Your weapon: A tablet. Your enemy: The Truth. Journey up the river to find Mr. Kurtz, the man who civilized the horror, and discover the true cost of your battery life. A modern retelling of Joseph Conrad’s novel: Heart of Darkness. https://tintwotin.itch.io/heart-of-darkness

https://tintwotin.itch.io/kaspar-hauser-the-soul-murdered

An interactive historical fiction based on the life of Kaspar Hauser. Your choices determine his fate and the nature of his soul.

Kaspar Hauser (30 April 1812 – 17 December 1833) was a German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell. His claims, and his subsequent death from a stab wound, sparked much debate and controversy both in Nuremberg and abroad. Theories propounded at the time identified Hauser as a member of the grand ducal House of Baden, hidden away because of dynastic intrigue. However, there were also allegations that Hauser was an impostor.

So far I'm the only user of Kinexus. Close to no players of the games. Branching narratives/interactive fiction is dead an arrival.  So, choose your battles wisely.  What are you up to? 

Thank you.

A psychological horror where you guide August Strindberg through a haunted, theatrical world. Your choices will determine the nature of his art, his sanity, and his soul in a race against a rival who may be more than just a man.

The game is a tribute to the life and works of August Strindberg, specifically structured around the three major phases of his career: his Naturalistic tragedies, his occult "Inferno" period in Paris, and his late Expressionist "Dream Plays."

Play: https://tintwotin.itch.io/azraels-manuscript

Right now, a new interactive fiction editor/authoring system is released every two days. Don't ask me why. Maybe BC of Vibe Coding. I've done a fairly advanced editor myself (Kinexus - it's free, can be found in my profile). But adding music, images, video and speech etc. is not super welcome in the very conservative interactive fiction community, which mainly consists of writers and readers.  So, it is very much about reading and writing text, and not so much about designing immersive gaming experiences. But I seriously doubt there is any money in any sort of classic cyoa/interactive fiction today. So, if you want to do it,  then do it for the fun of doing it. Don't expect it to grow into a somewhat decent income at all. 

The Demon storyline (example):

Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (also known as The Nihilists or The Devils) captures the challenges of our time with dazzling force. That’s why I’ve spent a great deal of time creating a modernized game adaptation: The Fire. The game lets you interactively explore the dynamic web of human destinies and ideologies that ultimately burn everything down. Play The Fire here (NB: not for children): https://tintwotin.itch.io/the-fire

The game has been updated, with even more of the original game added.
Also, the update includes an important bugfix, which means you'll need to pick up all trophies before you can finish the game. 

Thank you for the comment. I've fixed a bug that allowed for going to the DM without all of the trophies found. This should be fixed now, and an additional plotline to Hades has been added.  

https://tintwotin.itch.io/zork-i
The legendary interactive fiction game, modernized. Explore the house, descend into the Great Underground Empire, collect the Treasures, and find the path to the Stone Barrow.

Zork I is a 1980 interactive fiction game written by Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Bruce Daniels and Tim Anderson and published by Infocom.  This is an adapted version by tintwotin. 

I've done multiple games in my own Kinexus editor, but I'm running out of steam. I had next to zero content related feedback on my work, and I'm not really sure what to improve and which direction to take from here. Should I do more gamified novels (like the Fall of the King and The Man Who Thought Things), or transform more novels in the public domain to present themes (like Faust (by Goethe), or Provisional(The Trial by Kafka)), or focus on the original stories(the rest of the games)? Should I focus more on video, images, sound, speech or just text?

The games can be played here: https://itch.io/c/6268695/interactive-cinematic-fiction-created-in-kinexus