itch.io

Well I downloaded revolution irc on my phone, can't get it to connect to anything 😔 

Interesting... well no offence to your testers but they must not be very experienced players. This is easier than most of the original Doom 2 maps! And the modern "meta" is far beyond that level. That's not to say that you can't make easy maps, and in fact I appreciate when people don't try to push the envelope all the time and just let you cruise for a minute (especially in a large set of maps).

The difficulty settings are found in the properties of Things, you should have some checkboxes that say "Easy" "Medium" "Hard" etc. When you select a difficulty level in the game, only Things that have that specific box checked will spawn. I'm too young and Hurt me plenty spawn "Easy" items. Hurt me plenty is "Medium" and then UV and Nightmare are "Hard". This applies to all things! Most commonly you would have more and tougher monsters as you go up. But you can also have different amounts of ammo, weapons... even different placements for keys, teleporter destinations, and obstacles if you want to get creative. But as a beginner mapper you would probably want to focus on the balance between monsters, health, and ammo.

Difficulty settings are not mandatory but they do make your maps more polished, and allow a wider range of players to hit that sweet spot of challenging but not impossible. There's a nice page with more detail about difficulty settings here:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Skill_level

Pretty fun map with a decent amount of areas for a speedmap, which I prefer over details. It is too easy though, so much resources are given to the player with not enough opposition. The dark spectre room would have been harder if I couldn't just spam plasma, while tanking hits with my blue armor.

There are a couple small errors such as nukage floor that doesn't hurt you, and one sliver of wall that you can see through, but overall nothing majorly broken. Texturing could use work as well but again, I care more about fun gameplay than perfect bricks. And it was definitely fun, just needs the heat turned up and the ammo turned down. One thing to keep in mind is that Plasma ammo pickups give you a lot. Plasma box gives you 100 ammo which is 1/3 of your maximum... on the other hand rocket box only gives you 5 when you can hold 50. In other words you need 10 box of rockets vs 3 box of cells to be full... and everything just ~melts~ to plasma.

I wasn't sure if jumping was supposed to be allowed so I completed the map without jumping. I didn't find the secret, literally had to no-clip to find it and then felt stupid :) 

In regard to "it's all been said before/not adding anything"... first of all every human and life is different from the next and nobody else can tell YOUR story. And second, even if things have been said before, so what? Why not say it again? Some people will not even know about whatever it is you think you're copying or echoing... for them it might even be the first time hearing about the topic. You might reach people your predecessors have not. I don't read a ton of zines and so to me yours is very unique. Something to think about ^.^

It just wouldn't be cost effective. You need infrastructure specifically built for streaming video. Also, moderating video content is an immense task...

Oh, that isn't my website. It was made by Sadness, who also created www.yesterweb.org. Unfortunately things there got out of control and she had to step away from webmastering, but at least some of the resources are still there.

The rest of the internet is still there (try Neocities and Nekoweb for an easy change of scenery). Remember, we used to have to search for websites. Google and many other engines try really hard to steer you toward products... go for alternatives such as the ones listed at the bottom of this page:

https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/cyberspace/surf-the-web

That isn't really the point of the original post which was mainly addressing privacy concerns. I totally understand the feeling of being pulled toward whatever has the biggest audience, especially if you are trying to make a living. But I think the struggle to monetize every corner of our internet lives is actually part of the problem (discord or any other service would not bother doing shady stuff without an incentive). You can still be a developer and want to chat with people without it being a brand mission.

<3

Wow. I haven't played ZZT in YEARS

10 days is not enough...

People can play your game without logging in to an itch.io account, so you would have to provide a way to manually enter a username anyway. I don't see much of a benefit from this unless you're trying to push people into creating an itch account. And that just seems antithetical to the vibe of itch, the one place where people are NOT treated like a commodity...

Revealing your age online is stupid, until you are in your 30s. Whatever steps you need to take in order to publish, you should be able to accomplish them without screaming from the rooftops about how young you are.

Your "understanding" of women says it all

Power consumption is more of a concern when using company servers that you don't control, I agree that using a model locally on your own machine would be (probably) harmless. And by the same logic, training it on only data that you own should also be harmless.

In regard to tagging though, I would suspect that Itch wants to keep things as simple as possible. If you really need a disclaimer then you can add it to your page, each developer can be as specific as they want about their process. 

On the other hand you are not purchasing storage space either. I think as long as you were reasonably able to download the things you paid for, then Itch has fulfilled their end of the bargain.

Think of it this way, if you paid for something at a physical store and then forgot to bring it home, you should be able to go back and get it within a reasonable time frame. But if the store closes down 6 months from now and you still haven't retrieved your item, it's really your own fault and it is unlikely that you will get your item even with court involvement.

Similarly, you cannot expect Itch servers to exist forever. You should be downloading things as you purchase them and preserving them on your own hard drives which you can easily have multiples of for security. 

Why does the quality of the end result matter? For those of us who want to support developers who refrain from using AI, the end result is irrelevant. It is the process itself that is in question. Your example is kind of like saying "Yeah I know they steal their cars, but they do a really good job of fixing them up afterward." Or, "I know this company pollutes the environment, but I like their burgers." 

You can comment on their game page. No need to necro such an old thread with off-topic comment :/

I don't see what is relevant about using resources made by others, with permission of course. I even pay for them sometimes. But artists or coders or anyone else who has had their work flushed down a digital toilet have -zero- chance of getting paid, or even recognized. The reason is that what comes out the other side is akin to a sewer pipe dumping the whole mix as one homogenized stew.

Now if people want to train on their own datasets that's fine. To be honest, I feel that this might be a self-correcting problem... or perhaps, not a problem in the first place. There's a lot of talk about how "this changes everything", but so far nothing really innovative has come out of it. Will it ever?

The workload is the least problematic aspect of AI. Although, I do think this could become a major problem... what if we get to a point where you don't need to learn much about principles of game development? I agree that current technology isn't there yet, but if eventually you can generate entire games using a few prompts, then your "it still takes effort" angle will disappear. You will succumb to your own justification as your potential customers decide more and more to simply generate their own game instead...

Anyway, the main issues right now, at least in my opinion, are leeching off other people's work, and depletion of real-world resources. And although the reduced workload isn't my first line of attack, it does still bother me a little bit. It comes off as lazy. I don't agree with you that "you have to understand and learn its mechanics." Unless you can program your own AI, you don't understand the mechanics. All you understand is that if you type in something different, you'll get a different result. It's like saying that someone who knows how to hit the gas and break pedals and turn the steering wheel, understands the mechanics of a vehicle. But all they actually need to understand is the interface. 

It is not obvious. If it were, it would be forbidden from day one, everywhere.

You are putting way too much faith in governing bodies. In reality, governments often need significant pressure before ruling on something "obvious" 

I've been using GDevelop, one nice thing about it is the exported project can run without WebGL 2.

Itch is not platform specific so you can have an embedded HTML5 game, as well as downloads for PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, C64, gameboy, pretty much anything

are you sure it doesn't say that you need to declare whether it has AI or not?

Doesn't seem like a fail at all for your first game. The one mistake you didn't make was to never finish the game and just endlessly move on to new projects without releasing them :P

Many of those free games include an option to donate, so there is still a bit of revenue coming in there. I'd be curious to know how many games are actually free with no donation option, although that section probably also includes the highest percentage of unfinished or extremely low quality content (and therefore not much bandwidth usage)

I don't haha, that's why I said "note to self"... I used to just use mIRC. I think I used kiwiIRC for in-browser at one time but right now the site seems to be down.

What about good old IRC

There are several mobile IRC apps around, not to mention embedded chats on websites that work just as well if you don't want to download an app.

"The thing is, Discord is a place where most people are. "
^ This is sort of the lynchpin of the entire Web2.0 exodus. The herd mentality is strong. But, to break out of it someone has to be first. You can't start a community by just expecting it to already be there when you arrive. I think the best strategy would be to start small, find a couple friends who also don't like Discord and get a small chat going. Then share your (hopefully positive) experience with others. People need to be shown an alternative, just saying "Discord bad" won't change much at all. Also telling people about an alternative is not as good as actually using and promoting that alternative (note to self lol)

hmm, I guess you could call it a directional lantern or something :) or some sort of magic device, flare, etc. With the idea to just take away some of the safe area from the player

Wonderful, I didn't want to get hired anyway!

Really nice idea, pretty fun for a few levels! It didn't seem like the difficulty was really increasing though, so I got lazy... it would be cool if some guards could actually chase after you, shine a flashlight, etc to challenge the player more. Nice to play something that is simple to play but still captures the feel of hardcore roguelikes.

Ah, that's what I figured, but I think that will look suspicious to most people. Having surprise .exe files in a google drive that is supposed to be a music portfolio screams malware. A video of the game would be much more likely to get clicked on, especially if it is on youtube which enables you to embed it directly :)

Why some of them are .exe?

I played Barony! Was really bad at it so I didn't get far haha, but it was pretty cool

I like when random dungeons are allowed to get a little bit crazy. I used to play a lot of ZAngband (roguelike) and sometimes a floor would be super small, which often meant that it was packed with monsters and items. Other floors would have huge open spaces (like almost the entire level). It really helped to break up the monotony of predictably sized hallways and rooms. It made things more fun to explore and also introduced strategic decisions, for example when entering an open-cave style level you could easily aggro too many monsters and get surrounded, so finding a safe spot to use as a home base was more important. 

I think your email is not listed anywhere?

"I was thinking about midi music that would sound like pc music" seems pretty clear but ok

I have some MIDIs that I could send you, if you would like to hear them feel free to send me a message at: magicsofastudios@gmail.com

MIDI is a specific type of music file, not related to chiptunes in any way. It is actually a communication protocol for musical information, so for example you can send MIDI data to an external synthesizer and it will play the notes using its own sounds. But your computer can also play MIDI songs, it will sound a little different based on what system is playing it but the file sizes are incredibly small compared to real audio.

"Effective in communicating the game's play" is a really good way to put it.. that's what I would say about Baba is You, when you look at the screenshots you literally start understanding the gimmick and imagining how to solve the puzzle, before even playing the game.

None  of the things they mentioned are specific to puzzle games. Also there isn't a single reference to anything other than The Company. It is basically an ad. "Backed by private investors in the IT sector"