itch.io

i'm so glad it was meaningful for you <3

the real answer is, i just think its funny to put michael cera in the special thanks.

i made this years ago at this point, but i do believe that was my rationale for warforged being able to drink more than a dwarf. they just burn it!

but of course if you want to use it, you can mess with the modifiers as much as you like.

honestly, these days i probably wouldn't even use this at all, and just assign disadvantages as felt dramatically appropriate.

so glad recovery is going well for you <3 happy it meant something to you!

you're so welcome! i'm so happy you got something out of it <3

thank you so much!

i'm sorry that you got the wrong impression of the subject matter going in, what can i do to make it more clear?

i'm so glad you enjoyed it!!

definitely is! but i got a lot out of making it, and from what i can tell a lot of other people got something from it, too.

https://pastellexists.itch.io/i-hurt-myself-postjam

https://pastellexists.itch.io/drinking-and-intoxication

With respect, this is not only a bad idea, but antithetical to Itch.io's purpose.
There are plenty of porn games on this platform I find distasteful, some of them I even think are wrong to make. But Itch facilitates these games because beyond a basic code of ethics, it is meant to be an open marketplace where anyone can distribute their game. Democratizing games is the goal.

It's reasonable to me that you should have the right to filter out content you don't want to see. It is not, however, reasonable to eradicate content you don't want to see. Banning porn games on Itch would remove vast swathes of queer art, and historically, porn bans have been used to do just that.

Advocate for better content filtering, not abolishing content you don't like. 

thanks! i'm glad you liked it <3

thank you so much! i'm so glad you got something out of it! i hope you're doing well :)

it sounds like you might have come to this with the wrong expectations.

this isn't a suicide threat. this is about my experiences and thoughts about self-harm, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

maybe it isn't narratively satisfying to end without a firm conclusion, but this represents a small slice of my life in a really hard time, so it's not going to be wrapped up neatly with a bow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thank you so much! this means a lot! <3

i'm glad you got something out of it !!

thank you !!

it does indeed restart after 3 areas! it isn't meant to be very long. as for the gif, it's conditional dialogue that appears if you try to exit the first area without speaking to the figure on the left.

thank you for playing :)

Absolutely, I'm not expecting them to. In my stated vision, reviews are still very much a thing, they just require a little more engagement from the reader, as opposed to the up-down rating system of Steam (which is, I think, better than a sliding scale system, but still not perfect).

The idea is that reviews aren't fast-tracked to a positive-negative value, and instead require some thought and effort from the reviewer, and some thought and effort with the reader engaging with the review.

https://pastellexists.itch.io/i-hurt-myself-postjam

I'm not sure attempting to limit youth access to NSFW content is really worth it.

Kids and teens will find porn if they look for it, they will circumvent any protection you put in.

This subject has been discussed at length on the forums and in the Discord community. There is, to the best of my knowledge, a general community consensus that a content warning system is the way to go, but we're sort of forced to wait for Leaf to make a decision on the specifics and implement it.

I think most relevant points have already been made in this thread, but I'll toss my opinion in:

Free distribution of creation is the core of Itch, it's community, and it's mission. Any degree of enforced categorization is an inherently slippery slope, and generally A Bad Idea™.

I generally believe Leaf is a good person with a good framework for what he does with the platform. However, every other platform of distribution, for any medium, in which "quality standards" have been introduced has fallen directly into a pipeline of censorship. The end goal is pushing queer art back to the underground. Indigenous art. Black art. Asian art. Radical art. Anti-capitalist art. The sorts of things the Nazis categorized as "degenerate art" Itch has value due to it's rejection of that pipeline.

It is dangerous to put the key piece to infiltration in play, when society at large has yet to figure out how to organize widespread and decisive antifascist action, and resist infiltration.

That all being said:
I think having tag exclusion and adding a "Joke/Meme" tag is a perfectly acceptable proposition.

I think you've sort of crossed the alt-right definition with the general internet definition.

In short, shitposting is just making dumb jokes, often entirely nonsensical. To use an example from a Twitter account I follow: "sucking cockingly" or "deep in gAy balls mode rn.: might not recover.."

The alt-right posts bigoted messages and says "I'm just shitposting" or "I'm just joking" as a way to seem acceptable to the general populous while dogwhistling to alt-right groups and people, and slowly radicalizing those who come into contact with it.

There are an incredible amount of potential pitfalls in a review system. And in fact, the one currently in place, the 1-5 star rating system is imminently abusable. That quality would be easily shared with any other proposition, and frankly, not likely to be helpful. What little utility they have is covered by the comments section. Games with a disabled comment section are usually doing so for good reason, and if not, simply avoid them.

The extent to which I would feel comfortable exploring a review system is this outline:

Reviews can be left independent of the comments, and cannot be disabled. Devs and users alike can report reviews, though developer input is placed on a fast-track so as to make sure a developer can get abusive reviews removed post-haste. These are, in essence, a text post. There is no built-in rating system, no stars or thumbs up or down. Thus they have no sway in discoverability. There is a minimum word count (fairly low) to prevent people from useless commentary like "bad game" or "hella fun." Separate from the review system, you can recommend a game. This adds the game to an auto-generated public collection, so it can be shown on a profile page, and an optional search feature would let you search for games with the most recommendations first. There is no "thumbs down" or equivalent, to avoid abuse, review bombing, and brigading.

Cryptocurrency is inherently a system of currency that rewards those with pre-existing wealth, whilst accelerating the decimation of our planet. To further legitimize it would be a grave mistake.

i haven't played this collection yet, but i have played each game individually. these are some of the most impactful and lovely queer experiences in games, and i cannot recommend them enough to everyone, queer or not.

sort of like kitbashing if you dropped all the pieces in acetone for a second or two and put together what came out

Dude, there is no anti-capitalism that doesn't promote another economic system. Every other economic system resembles socialism in some way, including anarchism. There is no "neutral" option. You got what you asked for, you just didn't realize you didn't like what you asked for until too late.

A quick and crunchy system to track the effects of alcohol on your party's adventurers. Probably excessively crunchy. I made it about a year and a half ago, but I figured I'd upload it here in case anyone was interested. It's certainly not perfectly designed (I was, quite honestly, a pretty bad D&D DM) but anyone is welcome to remix it for themselves.

https://pastellexists.itch.io/drinking-and-intoxication

Drinking & Intoxication
A crunchy supplement for 5E to track the effects of alcohol.

https://pastellexists.itch.io/drinking-and-intoxication

Dear god, I don't know why the formatting is so fucked up. Serves me right for copying from Typora I guess.

Background

Somatapunk is a Forged in the Dark science-fantasy TTRPG I'm working on.

It originated as a name I suggested for Miziziziz's in-dev biopunk FPS Wrought Flesh (previously titled <span class="md-plain" <thouest="" thee<="" span=""></span>Thouest Thee). If you're familiar with the project, you'll know you customize your stats by switching your organs. Hence, Somatapunk. Somata, plural of soma, as in the corporeal body, and punk as in fuck fascism.

A while later, I booted up a game of RimWorld and with the addition of psychic abilities in the Royalty expansion, I was feeling like making a colony of secluded practitioners of psycasting. When it came time to name them, I thought back to the name I suggested.

I closed the game and signed up for Neocities, (A web-hosting platform, a sort of spiritual successor to Geocities) and began to fumble through HTML, CSS, and Javascript to make a personal website styled like some futuristic DOS command-line that greets you with the words folk-legend Woody Guthrie feverishly painted on his guitar: "This machine kills fascists." That was the birth of the world of Somatapunk.

Shortly thereafter, I decided to make an RPG.

<span class="md-plain" <the="" influences="" i'm="" striving="" to="" incorporate="" are="" the="" videogames="" <="" span="">The influences I'm striving to incorporate are the videogames RimWorld</span>, Caves of Qud, Kenshi, and Fallout; the music of David Bowie and the albums <span class="md-plain" <three="" cheers="" for="" sweet="" revenge<="" span=""></span> Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by My Chemical Romance. This list of touchstones will almost certainly grow as the project progresses. Though I'm quite scared of leaning too much into Fallout.

A note on the setting

I haven't included many details about the setting, as in it's current state I have very little of it articulated in my mind. It's sort of an internal moodboard at the moment with very few concrete ideas. Hopefully future devlogs will elaborate more on the setting, since I think that tends to be what really grabs people.

Devlog

Working from a copy of the Blades in the Dark SRD in a Google Doc, I'm currently in the process of "scraping the paint off," renaming things and reading through it all several times over. I've made several notes at the top of the document on things that need to be changed or additions to be made.

Crews and Factions

One set of mechanics I intend to change significantly is the faction and crew system. Something I really want to be possible in the game is the creation of settlements and possibly a sort of broader Grand Strategy/4X-gameplay loop. I want the players to be able to start a revolution in a city, securing an autonomous zone of a few blocks and defending it or expanding outwards to liberate more of the city. (Significantly inspired by the BitD module Steelweaver's Rebellion) From there, I think it would be cool to be able to zoom the game out, bringing that revolution to the doors of other cities, establishing a government. I'm conflicted about this, though. Is it possible to maintain the ease of play of BitD at that scale? Is conquest even theoretically thematically compatible with local revolution? If it is, how can I mechanically incentivize the creation of just societies and communities? Can I make that all fun? At any rate, the crew system will need some reworking to facilitate a more literal expression of land that will allow the players to be a ragtag group of clandestine operators with no place to call home, a group of partisans fighting power, settlers carving out a place of their own, or a combination of all three.

To allow for the first, crew progression cannot be tied to land. Or if it is, an alternate path must be provided. To allow for the second, settlement management has to be engaging even when the vast majority of infrastructure is already in place and still provide motivation, intrinsic or extrinsic. Conversely, to allow for the third, settlement management has to be engaging and non-sloggish even without all the faculties. Such a balancing act will only become more complicated with faction building on a larger scale, which I suppose is another point against having it mechanically instilled at all.

Harm and Stress

Early in the process, I made a note that what BitD calls a Trauma Condition is not really accurate to actual, real-world trauma. I would even go so far as to say it's actively insensitive to actual trauma, particularly in conflating things that are largely negative personality traits (e.g: Vicious, a condition that makes you a cruel sadist) with trauma, something that, to my knowledge, has never caused someone to entirely abandon their morals. During a half-assed late-night read-through of a playtest release for the PbtA and FitD game Haven, by Nate Durell, I noticed they made a simple change in language: They renamed Trauma Conditions to Shocked Conditions. I think this is a vast improvement, and I will most likely steal it, even if I'm not entirely convinced it will be sufficient to make the mechanic foster compassion rather than further stigmatization.

Heat

In reading the zine/guide An Amateur's Guide to Hacking Blades in the Dark by Michael Elliot, I discovered a fascinating quirk of Scum & Villainy, a game I have yet to read myself: Heat is location-dependent. You can be burning up in one area, and cool as a cucumber in another. This is a reasonable change. Scum & Villainy takes place over several sectors of outer-goddamn-space, not one cramped city where word travels fast endowed with a single police force. I will absolutely be stealing this. I can't believe I didn't think of it myself. I'll have to get around to reading Scum & Villainy, if I can get my hands on it, if it has more of these simple but clever changes.

Transhumanism and Body Mods

Sci-fi and cyberpunk without body mods is dumb. Especially when the name of the game a synonym for 'bodies' in it's name. Blades in the Dark doesn't tend to emphasize personal belongings. But to be fair: neither does Apocalypse World, and yet in Monster of the Week I still kept a bullet point list of every single item my character, Ally Bowman (I love this character so much I'll include her whole story at the end of this), owned. And it was fun as fuck! While I think most players, unlike myself, won't be particularly inclined to research the models of sedan available in 1992 and detail the exact components of a Satan-possessed electric guitar, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that players would be all too happy to come up with some cool mods for their character in exchange for a mechanical edge. I'm not sure exactly how this will manifest, what mechanical advantages should be within the jurisdiction of body mods, how conditional the advantages should be, or how pre-defined they should be.

Gear and Load

Blades Against Darkness, a hack that takes BitD to a traditional OSR gameplay format. It divides load into three categories of accessibility: Ready, Slung, and Packed. This is fairly self explanatory, but just in case: Ready items have no penalty, Slung items take a second to get to, and Packed items are pretty much outside of rapid use. I may use this mechanic, but it definitely has the potential to just be boring and annoying.

Resistance

In vanilla Blades in the Dark, a player can resist any consequence at any time. Blades Against Darkness limits that ability somewhat, by giving players a limited pool of resistance dice. This is another mechanic that has the potential to be just annoying, but it could also foster some more consideration for what consequences are worth resisting.

Called Shots and V.A.T.S

A topic of much contention in the TTRPG community, particularly among D&D players, is the concept of called shots. The idea is that a player might say "I try to hack at his ankle with my longsword," and that action in fiction would have a mechanical effect, like lowering their move speed. From what I've seen, the argument against it is that it makes it too easy to stack debuffs on enemies, and any application of the concept against players tends to feel unfair, so it's better to avoid it entirely. And generally, I agree.

But, on the other hand, I think V.A.T.S is really cool. In the Fallout franchise, you can use V.A.T.S, or (IIRC) Virtually Assisted Targeting System, allowing the player to target particular body parts with percent hit-chance dependent on the physical bulk of the targeted part and player skills and stats. I think it's so cool. (Dumb that New Vegas stopped letting you target the eyes, though)

I probably won't include this, or if I do, it'll be very limited. Most likely, an ability for some sort of Sharpshooter playbook. But it's very cool and if anyone knows any really good implementations of called shots I would love to see them.

Conclusion

By the time I'm writing this sentence, I've written almost 2000 words for this devlog. I don't want to give the wrong impression: I have no idea what I'm doing and there is essentially nothing here yet. But if you've gotten this far, you either think I'm a hilarious naïve idiot, or you're intrigued. Either way is cool. We'll see how this goes! I'm excited for this. I'm hoping that even though I will have a lot more responsibilities come the start of the semester with school work and leadership programs, I'll manage to keep a steady, if slow, pace on this project. My track record isn't encouraging, but one can dream.

I'd like to highlight the generosity of Kavita Poduri and Quinn Bleiler, who very generously gave me a copy of their hack, Songs for the Dusk. I have yet to read it, but any contribution to my collection of research material is greatly appreciated.

Extra: My Monster of the Week Character, Ally Bowman

Ally Bowman (Named for Ally Beardsley, who used to be a writer and actor at CollegeHumor and appeared on Critical Role during the Monsterhearts 2 one-shot) grew up in the sleepy town of Gladbrook, Iowa; driving an hour every Sunday morning to attend a service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church (Re-reading this now, I'm pretty sure Catholic churches don't have names like that) a few towns over in Waterloo. She was a prim and proper Catholic schoolgirl, who only read the Holy Bible and classic American literature, and played violin. That is, until her sophomore year of high school, when a friend introduced her to the band Nirvana and their sophomore album Nevermind. She couldn't get enough of the electric riffs and moody vocals. It sounded like every bottled up emotion and impulse she had ever felt. Her friend lent her the tape and Ally rushed home to listen. Not more than a few weeks pass, when Ally comes home from school to all the fury two middle-aged Catholic people can muster. They had found the tape, and were not pleased. She transferred schools immediately to an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Wisconsin. After a while, she began to notice several of the girls in her new classes making gestures at each other, almost like they were communicating through some encoded messaging system. Eventually, a girl made a gesture at her, to which she replied an awkward copy in the somatic equivalent of a "Haha.. yeah." After class, the girl whisked her away to the school basement, a strictly off-limits area. She was informed that the gestures were a form of communication between the girls of the completely illicit and entirely unsanctioned club, The Down-Under Girls. They met in the basement at night to talk away from the prying ears of ruler-wielding nuns, play rock music on shitty instruments they smuggled in, and most likely engage in some casual lesbianism. Ally joined the band immediately as their lead, replacing a girl who graduated. At practice one night, she messed up a simple C-power chord, and let out a whining tritone: the devil in music. Satan appears in a cloud of cigarette smoke, probably menthol, chewing on a toothpick and straightening his stained tweed jacket. "Come on girls, let's hear something," he says, sitting down on an amp. The band plays their signature song: God Can Suck My Dick And My Mom Is Shit. As the final distorted chord rings out, Satan claps and proceeds to offer them a deal with his record label from Hell. Satan bestows on Ally's guitar the ability to destroy angels and disappears in a cloud of menthol-smoke the same as he arrived. Swept up in the moment, The Down-Under Girls got too loud, and a cohort of enraged nuns burst through the door, decrying the girls all as Satanists. Ally grabs her guitar and runs, just barely escaping the pursuit of the nuns. The other girls are caught, and on that day Ally Bowman made a vow to liberate the school with the power of punk rock and Satan.

Never mind, *this* is the funniest thread on Itch.

This is the funniest thread on Itch, possibly ever.

I feel you might be under-estimating how difficult it is to automate such a thing.

With all-due respect, this seems immensely vulnerable to brigading. Imagine a marginalized creator (many of which have made their homes on Itch) getting their profile mass-flagged by the right in an attempt to ruin their credibility. Sure, this could be moderated, but I don't think Itch has the capacity to do that efficiently.

I think KC here is referring to a need to have content warnings or trigger warnings before viewing a game-page which may have the warning, but also potentially triggering content in view.

This is an old thread, so this idea may have been already supposed:

Instead of having individual tags for content like "Drug usage", have different categories of content rated by the developer out of 5*, similar to how the site Common Sense Media† does it.

Each axis of rating should also have a word-limited textbox to clarify what content is in the game, again much like CSM. Coinciding with this is a list of tags oriented towards potential specific triggers, (e.g: self-harm, eating disorders, flashing lights, sexual harassment).

This should also integrate into a Content Warning Page, appearing when you click on a game for the first time before showing the game page. It would show the content ratings and associated clarifications, as well as the list of trigger tags, then requiring a confirmation to proceed to the game page.‡

*: possibly with an aggregate community rating shown side-by-side
†: who I have significant hang-ups with, but nonetheless
‡: a plausibly important coinciding change is to allow the report system to file for misrepresentative tags and ratings