Am I allowed to suggest other people to follow me in exchange for a follow, or is that not allowed?
I just didn't see any rules regarding it...
I am curious. What would be the point of this?
Inflating follower count? Getting feedback from fellow developers?
While itch has some social media capabilities, it lacks direct messages/private messages. It usually is quite clear who wants to be followed (so you need not ask, and because of lack of messages, you actually can't). But those are publishers themselves, so them following you back by asking for it, is not really getting you more actual users, only a higher follower count.
On social media, "following" random people is a common spam and scam tactic. The spammer wants to attract you to visit their profile delivering their message. It is used like a ping phone call.
So maybe some feedback of fellow devs after release day.
Because traffic it ain't gonna increase. Or is there a weighting algorithm that makes creators with more followers appear higher in some lists?
You should definitly work on your game page designs and game tagging. 2d and singleplayer or arcade is not really telling. Itch does not even know the games well enough to have that button related games. (But I do not know if that can be triggered by relevant tags alone). Both prototype looks good. But the game pages is horrible. While it is browser game, you do not have screenshots as well. So there is no mouse hovering popup with enticing game graphcis. (That is what I mean with horrible, along with the complete lack of any relevant tagging.)
As a hint, guess what game is not among the ~100 games on this list ;-)
Bascially, yes.
This is of course only opinion from a gamer. But my perspective is how to find games. I have deactivtated auto play for web games, so no screens and too short description are bad. And to even go to the game page, I might have seen the game in browse, but not hover screenshots give no information. I also would not have found them via shared tags from other games I visited. I am not sure, if I used horrible correctly, but it sounds nice to mean that a thing is not good. As in, could be better compared to others trying to do the same thing.
I would liken it to writing a book. And then the writer doodles a stick figure as the cover image. Unless your last name is Munroe, that is a bad idea ;-)