itch.io

Frankly, who cares.  People interested in board games are likely to have a large overlap with people interested in turn-based strategy anyway.  Board games are basically a subset of turn-based strategy.

Not really.  In the context of the internet, "board games" obviously includes electronic board games.  Do they have to "look like" a physical board game, do they have to render some physical dice being thrown?  That seems a bit limited.  A "board game" in an online context pretty much means a turn-based strategy game IMHO.  Which my game is.

It was recommended on this board that I mention the game on there.

Oh, just thought I'd say this for the record: I tried to post about my game on the forum of boardgamearena.com and got a moderation warning for "advertising".  So yeah, they apparently don't want their members to know about board games that aren't hosted on their site.

lol

Well yeah generating levels is fine, but the actual playing of the levels isn't really a single-player thing - I think there'd have to be an AI.  Unless you can think of some variant game mode I could introduce where people could play single player.  Capture all the hexes as fast as possible?  I think that would be rather boring with no competition. :-)

Yeah given the tree of possible moves with my game that would turn into a virtually infinite number of games very quickly.  Some kind of directed A* search is probably needed, and that is gonna be tough.  Either that or hand-craft some AI behaviours that make some sense, but probably aren't all that hard to beat.  As I said, ideally I'd have some kind of reinforcement ML expertise on my team and the AI could be trained to make good moves through the whole reinforcement neural net magic. :-)

Thanks for the comments.  Yeah, I had already considered the mutliplayer-only aspect as problematic and thought of adding an AI months ago, but just haven't got round to it yet because AIs are pretty difficult (even dumb ones).  I actually looked into reinforcement machine learning as a way of building a decent AI but it's very complex and difficult and basically requires using Python for everything, which I'm not that familiar with either.  I'd love to get help from someone with AI building experience but I'm guessing those people don't tend to volunteer their time and it'd probably take a large salary to hire them :-)

Yeah I wasn't expecting it to make $100k or anything but I was kinda hoping for a small community who could play regularly.

So I've promoted my game on various platforms including itch.io and - holy crap, is it hard to get interest.  A few people have told me it seems interesting or whatever but literally no-one has joined the Discord server.  Is it basically impossible to get anyone playing your multiplayer game unless you're a big studio with a big budget or something?  I knew it would be hard but this is depressing.

Hi everyone, I've just recently published my new web-based hex strategy game Mystikaze.  The project is at: https://nulisar.itch.io/mystikaze

I'd appreciate any feedback on it people could give and play-testers would be great to have too - if you're interested please drop into the Discord server that's linked on the game's website and say hi!

I don't consider the game finished, and in fact I have a very long 'to do' list lol, I just consider it to have reached the point where it's reasonably playable.  It is multi-player only at the moment (AI is hard) so again if you'd like to get a game set up and don't have other people with whom to play please drop into the Discord server.  Thanks!

I tried this, and the trouble is that my game totally relies on setting a cookie to retain your user ID so inside an iframe it won't work because the cookie counts as a third party cookie and it won't get set.  So how can I get it to break out of the iframe?  It really needs to run in its own tab.

I'd love to put my new web game mystikaze.io on itch.io, but it is hosted on my web server so there wouldn't be anything for itch.io to host.  I'm a bit confused as to the nature of the content on itch.io - can I put my web game on here somehow or does it have to be "downloadable"?