There are a few ways to get on the homepage. For projects we curate, there are two main slots: Featured games and Fresh games. 

• Featured games are up on top, and they tend to stick around longer. It's the stuff we think other people will really like. We may also cover this content on our YouTube channel. Projects are added at the discretion of our curation team.
• Fresh games lives below the featured games. Stuff that might be worth checking out, but we haven't had the chance to fully look into. Projects get added pretty frequently (many times per day), so it's always changing. This allows us to give many more people an opportunity to get a spotlight. These games can either come from our curation team looking over stuff, or can be pulled from the collections of users on our platform. (The exactly details are a bit secret to avoid cheating)
• Games on sale: If you have something for purchase and put it on sale during one of our announced promotions, then we set up special rows highlighting what is on sale.

A quick disclaimer, itch.io gets 100s of new games uploaded a day. We do our best to try to go through as many as possible, but there's always a chance we'll miss good stuff. If you want to make sure you get our attention, make a great looking page. Stuff that uses the default template that shows no effort we'll probably skip past.

In addition to showing up on the curated sections, there's are a few other ways to get on the homepage:

• New releases are shown to your followers: If you have followers and you release a new game, then your game will appear on the top of their homepage until they click on it or it gets pushed off by other games from people they follow. So the advice here is building an audience on itch.io is a great way to have an instant audience to publish your game to
• Recommendations: If you appropriately tag your game, then your game has the possibility of showing up in the recommendations area. The exact things that show up are determined by many factors, but if your project isn't tagged correctly then it will never show up. This works by something called collaborative filtering, so "People who bought X also tend to buy Y" type recommendations.

Hope that helps