itch.io

Just saw the post(s) announcing the new options for social links on profiles. YES! Thanks so much for implementing this itchio team! <3

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/deck/@itchio/113476698236056658

https://bsky.app/profile/itch.io/post/3latshiu5em2l

Thanks! Unsure if I want to put a limit on tree orientation. I did intentionally make it so the position of the tree changes to the underside of the floor if you scale negative (mostly because it seemed funny) but I should maybe add that for rotation as well if I'm leaving this unrestricted.

I've just realized the Other link in that list does in fact work exactly like the previously suggested custom link where you can fill in any name at least for the metadata External Links, so that's something... in the absence of listed preset options we can use that.

Interesting. Will have to give that a try. Though I still hope itchio can build some more filter options into the official site too.

Also I want to point out that it's baffling that in the Metadata > External Links panel for games, you have all these options for link types (even the much maligned social network Threads that no one likes, which only launched last year) and you've taken the time to update Twitter to "Twitter/X" the stupid name that everyone refuses to use, but still no Mastodon anywhere? Neither here, nor in the profile social links. This is extra strange given that you even have an official Mastodon account for itchio. Really seems like an oversight.

Anyway, I've gone ahead and scrubbed all the Twitter references from my games pages and will go back and add Mastodon (and maybe Bluesky) links when it becomes possible to do so.

(side note: Steam Greenlight is long dead and links to it just give an "item is either marked as hidden or you do not have permission to view it" error now so maybe time to remove that one)

Bumping this topic to remind that this still needs to be added urgently given the total implosion of twitter as a usable social platform. It seems in recent days all of gamedev and artist twitter that hadn't already left for Mastodon have now moved to Bluesky... It's long past time to ditch twitter as THE de facto social media. Either add specific options for each of the major sites (Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitch, etc) that are not already listed OR do like Mastodon does with user bios and just create a custom blank space for links that you can fill in a URL + description for yourself, and add as many as you like.

Read carefully through the readme and you may find a hint.

I've made a small compatibility update to the Android version and it is now available as an APK.

Again with the pointless distractions that have no bearing on the topic at hand.

Spoken like someone who doesn't have the first clue what creativity is. What you're describing is giving instructions for *someone else* to create something. They are doing the creative work in this scenario (to the extent that AI output can be called 'creative'), not you. You are a client commissioning an image, nothing more.

I am well aware of what the article says. Valve is being cautious because they would be legally liable if they didn't, and they make a point of never having opinions about anything, but there is no ambiguity.

In fact these things ARE already covered by existing laws and the only reason we're having this conversation is that asshole tech bros without principles continually break the law and then hope they can get away with it by buying politicians AFTER they've already broken it (see the entire history of Silicon Valley).

"a creative expression is not needed for art" LOL

This conversation is not worth continuing.

Please. Software piracy is also widely considered stealing even when no physical object is removed. If you're going to posture about "better arguments" you should consider not wasting time with pointless semantics.

Prompting generated 'art' is NOT creative; you are just doing a pattern search which contains ZERO expression on your part, again akin to googling images and picking one of the results, then claiming it's 'your work'. And no, typing search keywords is NOT expressive. Also no, a little 'in-painting' to re-roll your search doesn't change that either.

Only someone who doesn't understand anything about creativity would compare machine pattern extraction with humans learning from and being influenced by other art. They're not even remotely similar. People talking like these glorified search engines are one step away from "advanced AI" are fully delusional.

Any responsible lawyer will tell you commercial use of derivative AI generated images based on copyrighted work that you do not have license to use is copyright infringement. For this same reason, Valve recently announced they are not accepting game submissions that contain AI-generated material for which the developers cannot demonstrate they have full rights to use 100% of the material involved, which if you're relying on any of the popular image generators you cannot because they're ALL built on stolen work, which you have no rights to whatsoever. The only legally acceptable way to use generative AI commercially is if you train it from scratch exclusively on data you have the rights to use, so either your own work, or properly licensed or public domain material.

In conclusion: if you want art in your game hire an artist OR learn some basic art skills and choose an achievable simple but effective art style. There is NO field more open and democratic than art, literally anyone can pick up a pencil (or free software) and start learning.

ALL currently popular AI image and text generators are based on stolen work. Until that is no longer the case, and there's no indication this will change until (inevitable) lawsuits and heavy regulation, all so-called 'AI-art' should be banned on creative platforms. It's not even creative work, it's no work at all. When you type a prompt into Stable Diffusion, Midjourney or Chat GPT you're not creating anything, you're doing a pattern search. The result is not yours any more than if you had done a Google image search. It's a derivative composite of other people's work used without permission and you definitely cannot use it for commercial work.

Now, it's a little complicated because there are smaller scale AI-based or AI-adjacent tools (depending on definitions) that have long been used in various small ways in game development to assist or augment creative work rather than replace it. Things like procedural generation, content-aware fill in Photoshop, photogrammetry, etc... but the key difference is those were built ethically on licensed material or one's own work. Those are fine, mass automated plagiarism is not.

For those reaching for the tired "fair use" argument, AI scraping 100% does NOT fall under fair use because any commercial use of this tech fails point 4 of the rules of fair use which says that you cannot impact the value and market of the original author with derivative works. Not to mention, fair use is only an American legal concept and this defense certainly would not fly anywhere else in the world even if the US were lax enough to allow it (which they won't).

I second this suggestion. Given the trashfire that twitter has turned into, it cannot remain the only social link on itchio profiles. Please add Mastodon and perhaps others, as suggested above. Ideally make it so you can fill in the blank yourself with custom links, just adding a title and URL.

Thanks. ^^ Still tinkering with various projects, slowly but surely.

Hi, I'm not making further changes to the game as it was finished years ago, but the small NPC fish do have some simple flocking-esque behaviour, which you may notice as you play, though it is not based on the traditional Boids approach.

The game is finished and no longer being updated but if I ever do make a new android build I will consider this.

Wasn't expecting anyone to use that somewhat hidden feature just yet. This sprite replacement option needs some work, but you can check the included sprites for how to structure your images so they can work as tree parts, if you want to try that.

Nice! I like how you arrived at a very natural look through layering different procedural elements.

NOTE: I am re-entering this project for the jam (again). Working on a new build, but it's not quite ready yet. Submitting now so I don't have to bug anyone about a late submission page.

If you have no intention of fixing this problem just say so, but please stop pretending that we're all just imagining this problem because that's really really annoying. Either give us an indication of when this might actually be fixed, or tell us it's never going to happen because you don't want to do it, but stop acting like the problem is already solved because it 100% is not.

This is not really true. You keep linking to the same thread again and again, but as I explained in another thread, an obscure text command that cannot be combined with other filters is NOT a real solution to this problem.

People continue to request this feature because you have not solved the underlying problem at all. Continually reposting the same link to the same archived thread with the same inadequate solution is simply IGNORING the problem and telling people "it's already possible" is simply inaccurate. No it is NOT possible in any real sense to negatively filter tags on this site in a way that is actually USABLE.

You keep linking to that archived topic in response to these requests and this continues to be a completely inadequate response. An obscure URL text command that cannot be combined with other filters is NOT a reasonable solution to this problem.

People "ask all the time" because you haven't solved the problem.

Itchio needs actual robust filtering options in its interface as has been described in detail on this forum many times now. This should be a much higher priority for the site as it significantly affects its usability making it very difficult to find games, which makes people not want to use the site to look for new games, which is bad.

While a missing jam is an example of something being outright broken it would be good if you would also consider the related feature request of being able to hide (still existing) jam links without removing your submission. If possible, this would be useful.

When you enter your game into a jam it adds a link on your game page to the submission for this jam. This is good and useful.

However, once the jam ends it becomes less useful, only of historical interest. In some cases if you submit your game to multiple jams, or bundle jam pages like the two recent charity bundles, these links can end up creating a lot of clutter (especially if they have long titles). I've taken to simply removing my submission from jams after a certain amount of time just to clean up my page a bit. This is not ideal though, as for archiving purposes it would be better if that connection remained and you could still find the game among submissions for that jam.

It would be good if you could add an option to HIDE these jam submission link rather than disconnecting them completely. Or perhaps make it so the big link on the jam page only shows while the jam is still running, but expires shortly after, leaving the submission intact.

For an example, see below. I've since removed my submission for these jam pages now that both bundles have concluded. For another example I submit this procgen trees project to the PROCJAM every year as I tinker with it a little more (as this jam allows that).

To expand on that last point, let's say you were to use above obscure text command, that you can only find by unearthing a forum thread from 2017 or being told directly, to filter out horror games: https://itch.io/games?exclude=tg.horror

That works for that one tag (if you happen to know this command), but what if you want to filter out multiple tags??? Maybe I want games that are not horror and also not pixel art, or visual novels or who knows what... Do you add a comma? Does it even support more than one tag at all? This is a pretty clear example where there really needs to be an interface for this so you can easily combine different filters, positive or negative, to get the results you want.

Perhaps look at Random Bundle Game for inspiration: https://randombundlegame.com/

In some older threads it has been suggested that you can do this by typing "?exclude=tg.nameofthing" but I don't think I need to explain that if the only way to do something is to type obscure hard to remember text commands into a url and there's no button or other interface element that also does this then it is not really a feature and still needs to be added. Itchio already has so many good sorting tools... I get that you're a small team and have limited bandwidth for adding new features but why has more robust exclusive filtering still not been added after all this time? Especially when its absence is negatively affecting the experience of using the site in such a big way?

(it's certainly not just me, judging by all the similar request threads going back years)

I notice there are several threads suggesting better filtering. I made a thread myself earlier. This REALLY needs to be added soon because as it is the site is absolutely flooded with a certain kind of simple horror game, presumably because of a feedback loop of youtubers and streamers making playing that their entire business model and devs pandering to that demand, which creates more demand etc, until there is ONLY that everywhere drowning out everything else. There needs to be a way to filter out these things.

I suggested something similar in another thread but your set of suggestions is more concise and constructive. I second these suggestions.

On that note, it would help a lot also if you could filter by negative Tags or search terms.

Right now it seems you cannot say "show me everything except this". The Browse page defaults to 90% Horror because I guess that is popular, but if I'm not looking for horror games there's not much I can do because looking at the Tags page the same set of games seems to show up at the top of almost ALL tag pages. So because YouTube loves screaming at jump-scare games it's almost impossible to find anything else on here without going to specific Collections or some highly specific non-horror Tags. That seems not great, as far as discoverability goes.

Itchio does a commendable job of making the curated front page selection much more eclectic and catering to a wide range of quality games, but it seems to me it would still be good if ONE type of games didn't completely dominate the rest of the site.

It would be nice if there was an option to mark specific games or developers as Ignored when browsing itchio so they don't show up in your recommendations or other pages. When I open the Browse (Popular) page it seems to be almost exclusively jump scare horror games (a sub-genre I personally don't care about) and things like "poop killer" (???)... I would like a way to filter out these games I'm not interested in, because as it stand this makes the Browse page essentially useless to me when 90% is stuff I can tell from just the title or thumbnail I don't want.

Neat little puzzle game. I wish there was a way to turn off the music though. The music is okay for a bit, but gets repetitive pretty fast. Had to delete the music file to get around the absence of a mute option.

https://ninjadodo.itch.io/guppy

NOTE: This is an ongoing project that I'm re-entering, should have a new version later.

Somewhat related to this... just now I manually downloaded and claimed a game (A Mortician's Tale) without realizing I had already claimed it in a previous bundle, so now I have two entries for this game in my Things You Own library. Any way to merge these two entries into one? Not a huge problem, but would be handy.

If you buy this teaser/demo on itchio, will you get the full game when it is finished?

Thank you very much! I would still also really like better library management features along the lines described above, but for the short term this fix solves my immediate problem.

I just bought a bundle that automatically added a 1000+ games to my "Things you own" list. Previously it was possible to hand curate this list by manually claiming games from purchased bundles, but since that didn't happen here it has rendered my library basically unusable for simple browsing. I pretty much have to switch to using only Collections now.

I would very much like the ability to hide unwanted games or perhaps even to unclaim them in bulk (though they should still remain available through the bundle purchase in that case). Also the library really really needs a Search by Name option, and sort by tags and price.

Basically, please just add all the filters from randombundlegame and maybe look at Steam and GOG Galaxy or Playnite for ideas. That, and hiding or removing games.

It's a pity I don't speak the language and can't follow what you're saying, but cool that you made a video. Glad you enjoyed it!

I know. This is intentional. Is not especially useful, but I thought it was funny.