itch.io

> Why use this method anyways.

My reasoning is what I'm building will either be used a ton (resulting in zillions of files), or not at all. I really can't see having any casual users. Given that, not having working file management seems a huge usability hit. It'd be crippling for me, anyway, to have a broken file manager, and not be able to use a CLI as most people can't.

Do people just...not work that way, anymore? I see so many apps that just hide all my files in their config directory and give me a half-implemented riff on Norton Commmander to manage them with like that's a normal thing to do. I thought it was because they were low-quailty ports of phone apps. Is that an accepted practice in 2023?

Thank you, Tiny11 looks like exactly the thing!

I didn't know about the manifest thing but that looks like almost what I need. It'd allow me to at least tell the user what itch downloaded is an installer, but it still seems janky to stick an installer in their start menu (as I understand itch does with downloaded exes, matter what the manifest says? I think? It's not clear from the docs).

Is there truly no way to make itch understand that an .exe file I've published is an installer, and not the game itself? Alternatively, is there truly no way to tell itch what file associations to make for my app?

Hello,

I'm  hoping to be able to publish using butler, but what I'm uploading is an app with filetypes of its own the user will expect to be able to double-click and open the app (this is more like a situation of word processor files than savegames, so it's especially important).

On MacOS this will be fine, the associations are in the app's plist and the OS finds them on download.

On Linux, there's no hope of my one-girl shop getting .desktop file installation working right across distributions, so I'm just shipping an AppImage, which butler nonconfigurably(? that I can tell) crams into a .zip, which is the exact kind of trivial jank to which Linux users are entirely numb (I use Arch BTW). That's fine too.

On Windows, the way to set file associations seems to be with an executable installer, which is yucky to find inside a zipfile the way butler forces it, and also it sounds like itch then treats the unzipped .exe file as the game itself, based on this. That's just killer. Is there any way around this? I want to be a good itch citizen and use butler.

Bonus round: there's not a windows machine within three blocks of me that I know of, so testing any of this is really hard. I'm cross-compiling most releases on my Mac. I don't suppose anyone has a clever way to easily try things on a Windows box?

Thanks!