itch.io

Yeah i'm about on the same page. I like it well enough, just not wrapping my head around everything as easily as I'd like. 

Edit game, add metadata, add categories, add things that make it searchable when people are looking for games, make an announcement about it, if itch's native tools aren't driving enough traffic, you can always run google ads although they will get costly fast, share it on reddit, discord servers, etc. 

Making the game is generally the easy part, getting it in front of people who want to play it is an entirely different skill set. If it is playable in browser you may also want to consider submitting it to all of the old flash game (HTML5 games now) sites to get it in front of their audiences.

I just had a look at your page, you should consider editing them and adding trailers, videos, screenshots, etc. Descriptions and other standard information. Even if people click on your game that does not mean they are interested, give them a reason to try it. Also, of the three games on your page it looks like none of them are playable, ensure you uploaded the correct files and tagged them for their platform.

Sorry, I had misunderstood your question. Yeah, I only found this one, starts in 13 days. 

Music Composer Jam #1 (+ Prizes) - itch.io

You are certainly not searching correctly. Click "Jams" up top and you should see dozens, you can filter them to see which have started, start soon, etc. I see a ton. Not sure why you can't.

Sounds pretty cool, good luck with it!

Lol facts

Some countries, localities etc also offer grants, loans etc to fund creatives, be aware that many (but not all) of these need to be paid back. But it may be worth looking into if you need serious funding. If you are just looking for small amounts of funding, you may want to try reaching out to smaller internet based businesses for product placements, sponsored messages, acknowledgements in the credits etc. While businesses local to you would be the go-to for most people, it wouldn't make sense for a local dentists office to want to get involved, but a locally based internet T shirt company that has a print on demand website may be more likely to be willing to throw some money if there is a link to there shop somewhere.

But keep in mind, mutually beneficial arrangements with businesses may make your project look like a sponsored work to potential players, while its one thing to add consumable inventory items based on a soda brand you are advertising for a sponsorship, or maybe a "thank you sponsors" splash screen, its a completely different thing to add links to other company's online stores.

Are we talking like I die once I finish it? In that case I'm making a gigantic open world lifesim with an insanely large scope and remaining a solo dev for the entire project (i will never finish and thus never die)

Or do we mean like i'm dying in a year regardless and have time to pump something out first? In that case probably just a super nice incremental/idle game, that would be a fun legacy to have, nice and relaxing.

Or do we mean last project for a while like i'm going on a multi year business trip or something and won't have time to dev? In that case, I have no idea.

Discuss pay directly, address your budget, or your model of payment ASAP, whether you need a volunteer slot filled, paying per piece, per hour, budget, rev-share, etc. Also discuss things such as ownership of the assets, in some countries and some states emails can be used as legal evidence in court, you may want to look into a contract specifying everything to protect you and the artist.

I can only answer bits and pieces of your questions based on my experiences, but as a coder/designer to make the artists job easier, learn how to use art in any format they send, for example if they are making you 2D sprites, you will probably be receiving sprite sheets, learn how to import sprite sheets in whatever engine you are using, so that you don't have to look like an idiot and ask the artist to export every still image seperately as well as sending you animated versions for actions. Learn everything on your end, learn basic photo editing incase you need to make minor adjustments, be as clear and detailed as possible about what you want/need so you don't need many (if any) revisions from the artist. I personally like to give artists the freedom to make their own ideas come to life, i'll give a brief prompt of what i want, size, format, etc, theme, color pallet, but i don't want to micro-manage and get too particular about my vision, i want the artist to do what artists do, and make art.

Make their job as easy as possible by either knowing exactly what you want, sketching up concepts to show them so they can understand what you want, or keep it open ended and trust them to make what you want, either method can work. 

Looks awesome, very interested. Just sent you a DM and a friend request, DM can't go through until you add me back.

Been better, been worse, life keeps on keeping on, that's for sure.

I like it, runs well, simple enough, easy controls. Description says use A and D keys to move left and right, but it's an auto-runner, maybe take it out of the game description if it doesn't do anything. There isn't a ton of contrast between the background and the enemies if you want me to nitpick and find points of improvement. Especially as the game speeds up it gets harder for my eyes to see whats coming.

All in all though I like it, simple concept, easy to pick up and play, pretty cool, good work.

High Score: 712

High score 712

This is such a general post, I apologize for not knowing exactly what you are looking for here.

What is your dev background? You say it's your first time making a real game, does that mean you've made other games and just didn't commercially release them? Didn't release them at all? Were they just prototypes? Were they in a different engine? Or is this your first time using any kind of software to make a game?

Any advice someone on this forum would give you is going to need to know a little bit about what you know, so we can assume what you don't know.

Are you looking for just general tricks to speed up development? Or to minimize mistakes? Are you looking for advice on a certain aspect? Coding? Art? Where to find assets? How to make assets? Distribution?

If this is your first time making ANYTHING, you might want to do some micro-games first, find a YouTube tutorial series to follow along with while you learn the basics of the engine you want to use.

You say you are going to use Unity and both you and your friend are developers, does that mean game developers, software developers? What are your skill sets? If you want to use Unity you might want to invest some time into learning C#, though I believe they support visual scripting nowadays as well. Microsoft Learn has a lot of free C# resources to learn the basics of the language, by the end of that course you should be able to read documentation, which is the key to being able to program a game, documentation being the specifics of the Unity engine, so that you can use C# to control aspects of it.

Please give a little more context as to what part of development you want advice for and I, and I'm sure others on the forum would love to help with what we can!

Best of luck!

Looks awesome! Good luck with it!

Find some nsfw art forums and things like that, post previews or art or something, leave links to your work here. I don't know much about the nsfw market but I would imagine, just like with everything else, you need to go to where people who want that content hang out, and put it in front of them, in order to drive traffic to your work here. Find subreddits, forums, and other boards, art sites etc. that have congregations of people who are into the same kind of content you are making, and don't spam the boards, see what is allowed to post there, whether it be previews, art, or just a text introduction post where you talk about your project and make sure to complete your profile with links to your work here, etc.

Hope this helps you brainstorm.

Have you or do you want to use AI in your Game Development process?

I've experimented with tons of different AI assets from help troubleshooting code, using AI visuals for things, and even using it to help me brainstorm. Honestly, I like it, and I think it helps enable creativity and bringing a vision to life that someone may otherwise not be able to figure out how to integrate. I can understand artists who hate it and think it's eating away at their share of the game dev/creative job market, but at least thus far, AI visuals are in no place to be used as game assets, maybe backgrounds or concept art brainstorming, but not as in-game assets (objects, characters, etc), atleast I haven't come across anything that looked game-ready.

I was just posting asking if this was a feature supported by itch or not, and since I made my post this topic popped up. Itch needs to add support for revenue splits, this would inspire so many more collaborative projects on here, once you cut out the potential for accounting issues, people who stop checking their account and sending payments a month after a game is released etc. This seems like this should be such a standard feature on any platform that handles paying creators. I hope it gets implemented at some point.

That's about what I expected, though I wished I was missing something. Seems like it'd be a pretty good thing for itch to add support for. Thanks for the reply.

Looks awesome

Awesome, I don't usually find a ton of tools for GameGuruMax, it's cool to see something that can actually work with it

I'll try to chime in here although I have never sold assets on here, I have used some, hopefully what I can add to this conversation helps to some degree.

-when to consider an asset pack done?

This is something you need to figure out based on your own goals. It might be complete with just one sprite of a lantern. Might be a hard sell especially if you are charging for it, but if the only thing you wanted to sell is one sprite, one sprite is all it would be. Similarly, if it's just one character sprite, plus a spritesheet of actions the character can do (e.g. jumping running attacking etc) maybe thats all it is. Don't think just because you saw a 200+ piece medieval fantasy asset pack for sale, that you have to do that. Whatever your goal is, once you hit it, it's done.

-smallest reasonable size for an asset pack? 
(like is it ok to put out a pack that is basically just the same cat with a few different colors/textures applied)

Absolutely, the last asset pack I downloaded was a few tank models, in a few different colors each. If it's something specific, once you hit that goal it is ready to go.

-proper format across different styles mentioned above? 

Assuming you mean file format, the last asset pack I downloaded was all .png files (aside from the text file about licensing etc). You don't want to do any software specific file types because for example if you use photoshop, the guy who buys your asset pack may not have photoshop, now you are adding extra hoops for them to jump through to be able to use it. Vector files are great for any kind of asset that is likely to be edited after someone buys it, but I don't really know how common that is. Common file types like png are probably the easiest to be able to work with for most people.

-pricing?

Something reasonable. Free will always be the easiest way to get people to use it, if that is your goal. As much as I hate recommending ever working for free, if it's your first time doing something like this, consider making it free. Once you build a name and reputation charging makes more sense, by all means you can start out by charging but if you can't do free, it should probably be as cheap as makes sense in your head.

I love it

Awesome, I love it!

Please excuse my negligence if this has been asked before, I searched around and couldn't find any results but it seems like it would be a common question:

I see a lot of people looking to find teams for projects and offering revenue shares/splits, does anyone have experience with this? Does itch have a way to set this up? Or does this become a situation where one person (the uploader) gets paid and then has to handle the accounting side to make sure that their team gets paid? Is that how it works, just trusting someone's word and hoping they actually pay? Or is there a better way to handle this?

I'm not working in a team right now, and am pretty reluctant to even entertain the idea because I don't like the idea of just trusting that somebody is going to track revenue correctly, and pay me my share correctly. There has to be an automated way right?

This looks awesome dude, hell yeah! Shooting you an email.

Hey friend, welcome to the site! We're all happy you've joined us. Yeah getting people to play your game is a super cool feeling. I used to host my games on mediafire (imagine google drive before google drive), and I didn't collect stats about if people ever actually downloaded it or not, having a dashboard here that tracks browser plays, downloads, views, it's super cool.

If you are new to development, you'll find that this is a very welcoming community that is happy to try to help you when they can. If you've been developing for a while, still don't underestimate the community, sometimes a new perspective on a problem can show you a new idea on how to troubleshoot it.

Just remember if you are new to development, keep your project scope small. What that means is, don't try to make the next open world hit, you'll never finish making it. Learn the basics of whatever engine catches your eye, and make micro-games, join game jams, make fully complete projects as small as possible so that you can actually finish them. Nothing against making that dream game you have in your mind, just understand if you are a one man team, things take a long time. 

Welcome to itch!

Yeah man, seems like discord is the standard way to communicate around here, add me, we'll see if i can help you with anything. 

I'm US eastern time zone as well, just be forewarned I work strange hours a lot of the time and only have discord on my computers, so if i'm not online and you message me, i'll hit you back as soon as i see it! 

Disc: lethalmotion

Looks like I never stopped here to introduce myself when I created my account.

I hope everyone is doing well. I'm Joe, I've been on and off developing games since 2012, I have tried and failed for many years to make cool 3D experiences in Unity and Unreal, and am slowly realizing 2D might be my fate. I love 3D, shooters, action games, and namely open world RPGs, but in all my years the complexities of 3D development is just so challenging to get working correctly. I have a lot more fun with 2D and find that the development time of everything gets cut down to a fraction of what it would take to get anything in 3D working, so atleast for the time being I think I'll be fine working on 2D projects and UI only projects (think of cookie clicker, i guess it's technically 2D), I've participated in a few game jams on here in the short time I've been on itch, it's a lot of fun and a cool way to work on projects that I otherwise would have never been making. I strive to be active on here and become a part of the itch community, I'm certified in python programming, so I try to help pygame devs troubleshoot (even though i can barely help myself *see my profile for a pygame project that i can't get packaged into an .exe*), I also am into PC building, cyber security, GameMaker is an engine I spend a lot of time in, I toy with Unity but can never seem to get it to work how I want it to.

Anyway, I've been aware of itch for years and finally decided to come join and have some fun with y'all.

Have a great day, I'll see y'all around!

Pygame dev here, I wish I could give you a straight answer, but I've never done it, my first thought was to look through github and see how other people are doing it, and theres a lot of results for "pygame infinite" Repository search results, as well as random terrain generation here: Magoninho/terrain-generation-test-pygame: Just for testing a random 2D terrain generation system i've made (not with perlin noise). 

I wish I had a better answer for you, but if I was you I'd be looking through github pygame projects, combing through their code to see how other people are handling infinite worlds, generation etc.

My first thought was importing random and having python pick numbers to represent different possibilities for what to generate, something like:

If we're talking a game like minecraft something like this could implemented so that when the player steps off screen, import random and choose  a number between 1 and 4 with 1 being sand biome, 2 swamp, 3 mountain, 4 beach/ocean, and handle it like that. In addition to using a system like that for biomes you could have random make a choice to decide if there will be enemies on that chunk, treasure, nothing at all, etc etc.

Sorry for not really knowing how to help, but hopefully between some brainstorming and github repositories you can figure out a good way to implement your generator.

Awesome idea, but these passion projects are super labor intensive. It's awesome when people take the time to make it happen, but it's way too much for most of us to try to do. I hope we see more soon!

I guess nothing ever came of this? OP, if you are still floating around I may be interested, I'd like to hear more about the project idea at the very least.

I've got on and off about a decade of GML (gamemaker language) experience.

With the keyword here being big projects, yes absolutely. A lot of the time if I'm working on a bigger project, I'll prototype individual parts as their own games to figure out mechanics, tweak them, and get myself to fully understand the system before implementing it into the main project I'm working on. Do I ever release these? Rarely, if anything maybe as part of a game jam.

And like others said, it's a great way to get yourself over roadblocks, try similar things from different angles, or just get your mind back into thinking creatively when you feel like you hit a wall on the main project.

Alright I just fired up my Mac to try and help you figure this out. I downloaded the game and got the same problem. What kind of mac do you have? When i look at the file info of helltaker, it says it is an "Application (Intel)" which makes me think it may not run on apple silicon chips such as M1, M2, etc. is that the kind of mac you have? If you don't know, go up in your left corner, click the apple, and his "About this Mac". If it says anything other than Apple Intel, it's possible that the application can't be run because it was designed specifically for Macs that run Intel processors.

I'm a PC guy, and just happen to have a mac to try to help you troubleshoot on, so hopefully I'm wrong and someone else can chime in and help, but from what I'm seeing it looks like it was designed for the architecture of Intel processors only. I also see in the project files that it was made with Unity, so maybe Unity doesn't support export to apple chips, or maybe the developer needs to create a different distributable to be run on Mac's with the apple chips.

For M1 Mac users, please see note regarding Unity 2021 versions - Announcements - Niantic SDK for Unity Community

The above link says Unity ended support for these apple chips, but it may have just been the M1, as the M2 and i think M3 are also available now.

Sorry, I wish I had better news but it looks like Unity builds a file type that only runs on Intel Macs.

If your Mac is Intel based and it still doesn't work, I'm not too sure

It's a slippery slope. Cool idea, worth looking into. But very much reminiscent of all those weird NFT games that came out a few years ago. Implementation could be cool, if it's widespread enough it could be a cool new way to handle in game payments, but the last few dozen similar ideas haven't panned out well. Nonetheless, good luck with it, if nothing else, a cool idea!

Not an android user but I'd imagine their market share on itch is pretty small. If I was an android user i'd probably stick to the more established marketplaces for apps. I'd imagine its only other devs that get anything from itch for their androids. It might be a good way to test your products, but staying on the Play store or similar marketplaces lets you avoid the issue of broken software from a dev that doesn't know about mobile development and simply ported his windows product, possibly porting it wrong and making it unusable on itch, potential security issues etc.

It only says that it can't be opened? Sounds like the file type may not be compatible with Mac. Have you tried it with multiple games? It could just be one developer's error in formatting a distributable for OS X. Can you screenshot the error, give information on the file type, etc?

https://frontlinestudios.itch.io/final-stand

Thanks! Yeah I think I kept the scope so small just to make sure I actually put something out, but I've been experimenting with actual upgrading mechanics, a better UI/layout and all the other things that are pretty standard in idle games. I might keep building on this for more than just the game jam space, i think it could become a fun way to kill a lot of time. I appreciate your supportive words.