Hello,
As of now, when a game meant to be played in the browser is accessed through the itch.io app, all of the game files and assets are instead downloaded to the player's computer.
Is there any way to prevent this?
... and you went to the Itch app and saw a ready to use zip file of your game there, ready for the taking? *
The caching of the Itch app shows up as a download. Every browser caches your web game. It is some of those quirks where no one knows the purpose of. There is a thread every other week about someone wondering why their html game has "downloads".
* I actually do not know. But I do know that the caching shows up as a "download". And I also know that incomplete downloads are also counted as downloads.
Interesting.
Now that sure explains why it shows up as a download. It literally is an install.
I tried two games. Your 4MB text game demo. That seemed to work from the "install" folder. Another game that was 15MB as a web version and 30MB as a download version. I "installed" the web version. This one did not work from the folder. The engine did not support running from the file location.
The Itch app is a browser, btw. A modified Chromium if I recall correctly. I needed to run that other game with the Itch app.
For that matter, the Steam app also contains a modified browser which was the reason why they discontinued older windows, because the browser basis they used did no longer support it. But Steam has no browser games as such. So how do you pack your Steam version? Is it exported with some barebone browser or how is it run on the player's system?