As sad as it can be sometimes, the game development industry is so heavily saturated it can be difficult to get noticed. 

There are hundreds of projects on itch.io that are very similiar in style and gameplay. It does not matter if you've put hundreds of hours into making a game if dozens of other people have also spent hundreds of hours to make games that are similiar to yours.

As a developer, your projects alone will not set you apart from the crowd. You need to be able to connect to your audience on an emotional level.

For example, Johan Gronvall the developer of Bopl Battle creates YouTube Shorts to talk about his game. He's even taken recommendations from his audience and implemented them in the game. When he finally released Bopl Battle, the people that followed his YouTube Channel were super hyped and purchased the game (some even did Let's Play videos).

 You can’t just post a game and expect the money to roll in. You need to convince your audience that the game is worth their time, attention, and money, ideally before they even land on your project page. How you do that is up to you.

There are almost 900K games on itch.io right now. Becoming popular takes time, and active marketing effort. Keep doing what works, and try new things. And have a presence outside itch.io! Your creator profile doesn't link to any site or social media.

Well, uh, that's $136.34 in revenue that I don't have on Itch - I have a grand total of $0.00. So, hey, that's at least one person here that you're getting paid more than! Gotta count the small blessings, I guess!

Honestly though, it's hard to get noticed when the platform's flooded with other games. You'll need to stand out - and you might probably want to start by making your game covers look more attractive imo. People won't know how good our coding and gameplay are if they won't even click on the game cover to take a look because our game doesn't look as nicely designed as the others lined up next to it. That's what competition is.

If you're looking at other developers' pages and seeing that they're getting ratings and comments, why not look at how they've designed their pages, game covers and where they've been promoting? You can learn a lot from that. I periodically look up popular games and check their pages and covers out. I'd look at the colors and fonts they're using and how they're describing themselves in their profile pages.

Anyway, try not to let your experience on Itch deter you from your passion if engineering is really what you want to do. Sure, you won't be able to code the stuff you want, the way you want and there are numerous death marches along the road, but I'd say software engineering pays bills and you might meet some good bros there if you maintain a good attitude.

As for game design... you can give it a try as a career, but I've heard that it's extremely saturated. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Good luck!

If your aim is only to get noticed I would recommend making your games free and also having them playable in browser. There are so many games on Itch that many people just ignore ones that require payment to play. People also generally don't want to download games, due to the general hastle and possible security concerns. Having games playable in the browser will make sure they can be played on Win/Linux PC and Mac too. Also, if your games' formats support it, try to make them playable on mobile (touch controls and 'chunkier' graphics that can be easily understood on a small display) and laptops (don't require use of a numpad or complicated interaction with a pointing device that would be hard to do with a trackpad) as well. That will help make sure you have the widest possible potential audiance.

Before you started developing games, how many "indie" games did you buy? Was this a thing to do? How did you notice them?

"Indie" is a mark of quality to boast on Steam. Why? Because indie games are great? No. Because there are so many indie games and everyone and their dog can make a simple game in a couple days in one of those game engines. It is like all those people singing under the shower and showing up for auditions of those casting shows.

But being professional, as in: being able to live of the activity, is hard, very hard. If an indie developer made it to this stage, it is a thing to boast about.

It is similar to how there are millions of youtubers. But how many of them do you know? A hundred maybe?

So to answer your question with another question: Why should you get noticed? There are literally thousands upon thousands of other indiehobby developers trying the very same thing.

In my opinion, "indie" is used wrong as a term, here on itch. Non professionals use it to describe themselves. But indie still means professional game developer that is currently not working for a major studio. It does not mean doodling games as a hobby and waiting to be discovered. And the waiting is the key word here. You need marketing to get noticed. Within itch that is luck based. All you can do, is make your stuff easily findable for the people that might look for it. Like tagging it, have appealing descriptions for your target audience, having good description that google will find and so on. But it still is luck based and you should do marketing outside of itch. A good approach might be to cater to some nieche audience that would seek you out and thus notice you. But competing against all the other devs, well, they try the same as you and if they made a game, their skills are probably not worse than yours.

And an even better approach would be to make games that are fun for you to make. Unless you do be a real developer with years of education of doing your work, it is a hobby. Not a profession where you are currently out of paying work.

You have made some decent money there. Lots of people on here have barely made anything and I'm sure they have put many hours in for little or no reward. Dropping your paywall back  to donations can help. It's less money in your pocket but expands your audience. I've mentioned this a few times on here . Money is tight at the moment for a lot of  people and most of people on this site are younger. They may even come here especially to find free games.  I wouldn't go aspiring to be a game Dev on the solo. Pocket money maybe or on the side. Most professional people can make up to $100 an hour on a regular day job.  So it's no worth it when it's $136 over 3 years. Less than 50c a day. Get paid more doing online surveys for 15 minutes a day instead. 

Let's be real here, heavy clickbait is the only way to be "noticed". Nothing to do with the quality of a game, there's plently of bad games that get extremely popular simply because they're clickbaitable. However those games die out rather quickly, clickbait attracts an audience and quality keeps an audience. The games that get popular always make use of things like buzzwords and well known ideas and topics, like being "inspired by another game". Clones of games and concepts tend to take off more than unique ones now but that's likely because that is all that's ever done now. Especially on here, you're only going to get popular right away if you make some average clickbaity horror game. The people making unique games already have a following, so they're able to do so. It's unfortunate but the only real way to be noticed right away to follow clickbaity trends. 

Most likely the 20-80 rule is in effect. The top 20% earns 80% of the revenue while the remaining 80% will have to share the remaining 20% of the revenue.

Some of it is luck, but the games that are successful tends to have good marketing.

Marketing does not mean advertisements though. Rather it means market segmentation, find your niche and appeal to it. Build and interact with the community to generate hype. Make a game that is good enough.

The better mousetrap fallacy is in full effect, you can make the best game there is, but if no one knows about it what's the point? But shotgun advertisement is a very bad way to build awareness. You want to target your marketing efforts to your core audience. If your game can have a playable demo it should have one.

it takes some time to get noticed but soon you will get followers

especially if you post in your game engine forum

Your games need a hook, something to pull users in. You also need to present them visually more aesthetically,. People are in general a tad shallow so something that looks pretty will get far more eyes than something that may be technically good but looks drab. Ever thought to turning to AI image generators to aid development?  My art skills are shocking and asset stores are saturated with the same old junk so I have turned to AI image generation. I wrote a dev log on it here if you want to take a look https://mrmop44.itch.io/aria/devlog/651117/ai-assisted-development. I'm a game dev with 30+ years experience, worked on all sorts from Doom to Need for Speed but I can't draw anything, I'm a coder and in general people do not like coder art.

I can't help with your original query I'm afraid. I have had much less success myself, even relatively speaking as I have only one demo here so far. I'll worry more about it when I have a finished game to promote, but in the meantime am trying to slowly grow as much interest as possible around the project before release. There's a lot of extraneous material for my game as it's a story heavy game with a lot of world building so I have a blog that ties into it people can follow, I'm planning a book that ties in with it too an I'm hoping all that will help get the word out as I finish building the project. Anyway, what I did want to say was I had a go at Catch Me Not, it's good. I like the music and your animations, so I gave you a follow. 

The Turtle won the foot race, if I remember.

Sorry, I checked your games but I found nothing interesting enough to give it a try.

Several months ago I started to play adult Visual Novels with the game "Summertime Saga". After that  I got addicted and played "Treasure of Nadia" and  "The Gesesis Order".  Both games I did not finish because the search for items and quests turned more and more complicated. I quickly found some other games with a less complicated storyline, better graphics and more lewed scenes. I absolutely loved "Eternum" and Ripples.

Marketing.

A good traffic giver for games is Reddit.
But you have to post in the proper niche, in the right way, and at the right time,
if your new to it, you should hang out a while posting comments before you post links.

I see you don't have any browser games. A browser game can help bring people to your page.
A web demo of a executable game your trying to sell, is a must, in my opinion, for marketing.
Because you can put a link in the game itself, and then place that web game on all the web game portals.
Newgrounds, indiexpo, y8, gamejolt, itch.
And your web game/demo should have a link, in the games hud, to your itch page or steam page.

Big movies and big games have a massive investment in marketing, why do you think big companies with recognizable names and brands still spends what me and you will gain in our whole life just in marketing? Because getting people to notice your stuff is the hardest part.

If you are really serious about your projects then you are thinking about investing your personal money into your projects, and that includes the money that goes into marketing. This basically means paying for twitter/facebook/instagram/reddit/google to advertise your stuff. Pay to have your stuff appear as an add in the same way you are bombarded with thousands of adds everytime you enter the internet (if the big ones needs to do it, imagine for unknow people like you and me?).

Dont worry about people noticing your stuff, be happy about what you made.