itch.io

https://itch.io/games/tag-unity has 100k games

https://itch.io/games/made-with-unity has 250k games

Overlap is only 50k. Which should make 300k total.

It gets more complicated for rpg maker. But my point is, that meta-infos are mixed in inconsistently with the regular tags. Someone searching Unity games will not find most of them if listening to the suggested tags. https://itch.io/tags/tools 

And even with the made-with tag, about 50k will not be found. I would dislike searching twice and I think many people would not even realize that there are two tags saying the same, one a regular tag, one a meta tag, and that there is a huge lack of overlap.

that could free up one slot in the "All Tags" list for a more popular or relevant tag that's beyond just 300 results

That the list currently has near 300 items is a coincidence. There are no slots on that list. It grows. It is not the 300 most popular/relevant/arbitrarily chosen tags.

Read the initial post of this thread for how this is intended.

but then I realized all of my games disappeared from search

Sounds like quarantine. And it is quarantine. Open your game in a private browsing window and click on your patreon link. The quarantine message will appear.

You ask this on Itch. Experimental games without corporate backing is kinda Itch's thing.

And I disagree with the bold experimental spirit. It is copy-the-thing-that-works all the way back to the 80's and 90's when video games became a form of entertainment. Read the history of Giana Sisters for a popular example from the 80's.

This whole copy-what-works thing is why we can classify games in genres. As soon as something is successful, it is either classifyable as a genre mix or spawns a new (sub-)genre and copycats.

Games need to be entertaining. If you deviate from that, you either have not made a game or you have made a very bad game. So all games that are entertaining will be similar to some extent to previously existing games. Even if they present the concepts in a radical new way or manage to invent new concepts.

Indexing or lack thereof does not affect promotion.

Unless you promote for people to search for your game or username instead of a link to your game.

you have to wait till your game be ready to be indexed

You don't. It was bad luck. Most games get indexed by automatic. Itch will not tell you why your game was picked for a random human inspection. But as it is with humans, all sorts of things can happen to cause a delay. My personal theory is, that they got hit by one desaster after the other without time for recovery. There were some bad ddos attacks in the past months, some server hickups and other things. Also it is winter and a lot of people are sick.

I am not on Firefox, I do not have those nbsps. They only appear if I use two  spaces. I would assume OP is on Firefox.

But since the editbox can use nbsps, this mechanism might be triggered somehow accidentally.  You have 3 in your reply.

I am not. And if a sentence is made up with nbsps, the rendering browser will not break the lines at the nbsps but at any space available or when the line ends in the middle of the word.

If nbsps are created by simply typing, that sounds very annoying. I know they are sometimes created when copy pasting. And I think by typing two  spaces. If so, there should be a nbsp between two and spaces when you inspect my post.

And if I recally correcly, if you delete characters and then press space. So there might be one in front of So.

https://itch.io/t/4120453/game-quarantined-search-or-indexing-problem-read-this

The sticky should have answers. 7 days is not really long. Some people wait over a month.

After reading your disclaimer, you might want to tick that checkbox in your game meta info that says your game has sensitive content. I got the impression you do not want minors to play your game.

Copy and paste again with past as text or whatever it is called in your browser. That at least deletes the nbsps. The lines above have no nbsp, the lines below both have the nbsps.

Edit: I do not want to edit the above posting to keep the formatting intact. But I now get it. Words connected by nbsp are one big word and that screws up the line breaks on the reader's browser.

I know an esoteric problem with nbsps and font rendering (0 width for a nbsp). But otherwise, why would nbsps screw up your formatting? You should not "format" anything with spaces. That is not how html is intended.

Had to screenshot that, lol, cuz the editor assimilates the &-tag, even when using the "code"-tag. ;-)

Had to screenshot that, lol, cuz the editor assimilates the &-tag, even when using the "code"-tag. ;-)

Both lines above are a test. Pasted with as text. One was copied from your post. The next was copied from inspect window in the browser, where I can see that it has 7 nbsp and 9 normal spaces. And the next two lines are the same with regular paste.

Had to screenshot that, lol, cuz the editor assimilates the &-tag, even when using the "code"-tag. ;-)

Had to screenshot that, lol, cuz the editor assimilates the &-tag, even when using the "code"-tag. ;-)

so in theory you should be able to claim the game

Claiming can be enabled or disabled for a 100% sale. There is possiblilty to make a limited promo "sale" where people can download the game, but not claim it.

But that game just looks abandoned. The sale length is also against the rules.

If many people access your game, it will get scrutinized sooner. Or so the theory goes.

Since there is malware on Itch, a lot of it, this kinda makes sense.

There are also hacked accounts, so they might delist and scrutinze a game again, after it was updated.

I have seen Itch take two months to take down a reported malware. They are very slow these days. Several issues coming together I assume.

The tag merges done were for synonyms. Not for stuff being similar. Have you seen any examples for merges that were not mere synonyms or different spelling? In the thread you linked I could not find any.

From your suggestions, endless + infinity runners seem to be synonyms and could be merged. Maybe others, I did not scrutinze everything.

For contrast, a wordle is not a crossword puzzle. Dark Fantasy is not of the horror genre. While webcomics are comics, comics are not webcomis, even if you sell them on the web. As for splitting, you are right, non-linear does not say much, if used alone. But that is why you have 10 tags and 1 genre. It is the combination. Just like an example in the merge thread: puzzle + endless. It is usage of both tags that give meaning.

That this list is called "all" tags, is bugging me too. It should be called suggested tags or something like that.

Edit: I just checked, the "merges" are done with aliases. As long as they use the word alias for this mechanic, I would assume they will only "merge" synonyms and different spellings. 

I think there is some kind of misconception.

Tags are not selected by Itch. They are selected (and created) by the developers. There are even typo tags. Like Horor. 

So Itch cannot "merge" tags. Or rather, I doubt they would want to. There is no fixed tag list, like on Steam, where those limited tags are also chosen by players or maybe curators.

What Itch does, is to manage a "suggested" tag list. It is the content of the drop down list in that tag box. But that list is by no means a collection of the most used tags. And not even all those suggested tags have a description. And those descriptions that do exist are neither set in stone nor binding. Basically it is like hashtags. A developer writes the tags that come to mind - like https://itch.io/games/tag-banana . Or uses whatever seems a good idea to describe the game or to help people find it. Mileage varies a lot here, hence your post.

But what they can do, is make aliases. Like, "commodore 64" is aliased with c64 and commodore64.

So if you see tags that really are the same, you can suggest those aliases to Itch. The different tags will still exist, but searching for one will give results for all of them.

You could also write a guide posting in https://itch.io/board/33833/itchio-tips how to select relevant tags. I mean, some 40k games even have this tag: https://itch.io/games/tag-indie 

But some things what you suggested are not quite the same. Enthusiasts of those nieches would probably like to have a word with you, for mixing their thing with those other things. To give a blatant example, people looking for gay content would not be happy with finding lesbian content. And just because you look for norse mythology does not mean you want to find greek mythology.

Others might be the same and are synonyms, so an alias would make seldom used tags more findable.

To pick up your last thought about the tag "suspense". What does it mean? It means the same as every other tag. It means whatever the publisher that selected that tag wants it to mean - within limits of the language. If suspense is something that can be associated with the game, it fits. If it is in the top 10 of tags that would classify the game, is another question.

And different tags for the same might also be a flavor thing that could have impact on recommendations. Like chosing flight over flying and vice versa might indicate something. Whatever it is.

What I would like to see is aliases for the engine tags. There is an Godot tag in usage. But also a made with Godot meta-tag. So if you search for godot you miss out on the games that did not use the tag, but did specify it in the meta info. And if you search the meta-tag (if you stumble upon it in the Diretory in the footer) you miss out on the games that did not fill out the meta info, but did write it as a tag. About 10k games that have the godot tag are not classified with made with godot. There are 53k madewith, 23k with regular tag and 13k overlap. So making the meta tag games appear via the regular tag would be nice for browsing. One would find about 63k games instead of only 23k.

I don't mind a game being popular and being on first page.

But for that game I doubt the algorithm really calculates the popularity correctly. The comment section of that game is not used to comment on the game, but as a real time chat. So most of the comment secion is offtopic. People do not go on that page to play the game, they go there to chat. That stuff is better suited for a service like Discord.

I do not land on the homepage after logging in. Mostly because I do not log in. I land on whatever the bookmark points to, that I used. Logging in is handled by cookies.

But there actually is a recommended section on the homepage.

Recommended for you

Based on things you've purchased, downloaded, and rated

And it links to  https://itch.io/library/recommendations if you click View all.

The feature could use some improvements, for sure. Like manually adding which tags you like and do not like. I like that idea of manual input. One could give a point score or other weighted information how much you like or hate a tag.

Recommendations currently are supposed to work by guessin what you like, by taking into account what you rate and what you buy. So, in theory rating the games you like, or spending money on them, should improve the accuracy of the recommendations - if the developers used tags. Itch could also use some other methods of comparing similar games. If they only use tags, the feature is bound to be less accurate, since tags are inaccurate and some tags have little information value. Like "indie".

I asked for the App. As was the user Aa.

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The regular website has an adaptive css that moves elements around depending on size. But it has a lot of room for improvement. The search box can eat community and feed and vice versa. There is also a feedback button on the left side when writing a reply. It disappears, when the site is not wide enough in virtual pixels.

My screen is 1080p, but my virtual screen is less, because windows settings and browser zoom. Even at 100%, my width in pixels, that the browser "sees" is only 1279.

console.log(window.innerWidth)

After increasing zoom level of the browser, at 853 width, the search bar dissapears.

On the Itch App? Does your search box give you search results? Is it on the left side or in the top row?

Good question. I do not use the app, but when I just looked, the website did not have the search box and the left side bar's search box is not working. Oh, it does "search", but only the recommendations. If I enter a word, it just opens a game and not search results.

For browser the 1080 says little. Browsers use virutal screen size and adjust for operating system settings and most important the zoom level you set. It might be 100% or bigger or lower. 

Since you downloaded it, it might be in your download history. The zip file might be in your trash can.

It might also linger in your things to rate list https://itch.io/library/things-to-rate

Keep in mind that Jpg doesn't support transparency.

webp does. Lossy and lossless.

There are claims that jpg is better at compression factor 90 and above and webp at compression 70 and below and inbetween there is little difference, but there seem to be differences based on the content of the image, so quality comparison is very hard and biased. Natural stuff seems to look better in jpg and straight lines better in webp.

So there might be situation where one would prefer jpg over lossy webp. But png is always loses by orders of magnitude, unless you need pixel accuracy. And even then, it typically loses against lossless webp.

and actually take up less space than a PNG still image with a smaller resolution

Which shows precisly the problem with a lossless image format. You can have an animation for the same space  ;-)

Thank you for pointing out overlay technique. It has many benefits and also the welcome side effect of reducing size.

Well. Itch is designed for games and known as a site for indie games. You can host mostly all digital things here, but the majority of users are still here for games. So they will not even see you by accident and probably will not be interested, even if they do.

So I guess you need to promote your comics like all the other comic artists do. However that may me. I mostly read webcomics and those have their own websites.

If you sort through games on pc and are willing to use a browser extension, there is another solution available. You would simply hover your mouse over a game and press a button to mark it as seen. The idea came about here https://itch.io/t/3477347/add-an-option-to-exclude-owned-games-when-searching and in some other threads. You can also mark developers. The actual "marking" is just css that will hide or highlight the games.

But if you really want to check out all games in a tag combination, the bookmarking and reverse recent order will be shareable between mobile and pc and should catch all games.

A "negative" collection for browsing sure would be nice. Steam has an ignore feature for games. But I actually do not know, if it is designed to hold hundreds and thousands of games. Itch collectons are not even designed with thousands of items in mind. So I guess, server side filtering of the general browse feature is just not a very practical thing to do. Maybe for a special page like recommendations.

Go to your settings page. There should be a red feedback button on the left side. If there is none, try changing the size of the screen. Itch's css is awful. It hides elements based on size of the screen.

and I don't want to type it in every time I search

Even on mobile there exists bookmarks. You click on that link only once. I linked the forum post where that link was posted by leafo. Then you adjust your tags and filters. Make sure you have pagination active, so you have a next page button.

You are now on the page 1 with oldest games first.

(1) If you will do less then the 36 games on that page, make a bookmark.

(2) Do your thing on that 36 games, like trying them out or putting them on collections for later viewing or whatever you do.

(3) Go to next page and continue with (1) - or stop for the day. Remember to set a bookmark, if you have not already done so.

Itch is not designed in such a way, so they did not provide the usual tools. There is a feedback button that has a suggest feature option to give this kind of suggestion directly to Itch.

Breaking it down by year has the benefit of making the big task smaller. If you do not want to break it down into smaller tasks, there are not that many things you can do to still tackle that task. Especially if you use a high fluctuation sorting like Popular or even New & Popular. Popular also has a new-ness factor that contributes to apparant popularity, but less so as compared to new&popular.

Going backwards through recent for your selected tags in paginated view and keeping a bookmark at your last visited page should catch all or most of the games. You need to use /oldest/ in the url instead of /newest/. I do not know if there is a button for that. https://itch.io/post/2493289

You should clarify what you mean with indie devs.

A game developer not working for a "major" studio is still a professional and will want to live from that work. So any experimantal stuff will have been tested on a small scale at least, before producing a complete game. A small and therefore indie game studio cannot afford to spend months or years developing an experimental game for it to turn out to not have an audience. 

As for hobby devs, you will see all sorts of bold and crazy ideas. Some of them are even successful and turn a hobby into a profession.

If you search such games, you might find more of such bold ideas under https://itch.io/games/prototypes

I read your comment three times, but you write without point nor comma in one go and make no pause and it is hard to read and to understand what you are even talking about and I understood that you complain most about the changing of the ordering of games.

Projects dissappear from time to time, so the ordering will always change sometimes at the page border, no matter what you do. Or they might have their tags changed.

And projects can get a bump on the recent sorting for having a devlog with a major update.

There are more filters in the directory. https://itch.io/directory 

The year filter in combination with tags might be of interest to you.

It sounds to me like you want to tackle a few thousand games in a tag selection and want to keep track what you have already seen and what not. On desktop browser I could offer you a tool for that. If you are willing to manipulate the url you could use page numbering, even in endless scroll. But that sounds like a hassle on mobile. You can enter a number manually in "?page=11". The max page should be around x/36 where x is the number your browser shows as the game counter. The lack of a back button is not helping there, and going backwards on the popular sort is not actual a good idea anyway.

But you can go backwards on the recent sort. Exchange newest with oldest in the url.

https://itch.io/t/4120453/game-quarantined-search-or-indexing-problem-read-this

Your game is quarantined. This should clear up in a while. Could be days, could be weeks.

Itch. Release a prototype and put the earnings into whatever needs funding.

Subscribestar. Patreon. All the other content support subscription services.

Kickstarter.

Also look in this sub section. https://itch.io/board/10020/help-wanted-or-offered

I do not understand what exactly you are talking about.

You complain that the sorting of games is not stable? How are other sites displaying items differently, so that it seems easier to you?

You can try changing this option in your settings, maybe the other system suits you better "( ) Disable auto-loading next page when browsing". But all the sortings change their order a little bit, as new games get released or rise in popularity.

The title should only be used to give information about the name of the project.

If you want to give additional info, use the field "Short description or tagline". It appears right under the title in the grid of games.

Search searches the title field literally. So if your game is called "Cool Name (en/ru)" that means that (en/ru) is part of the name of the game. Before, the name relevancy in search was split over "cool" and "name". Now it spreads also over "en" and "ru" and possibly "(/)". This makes your game a little less relevant when people search "cool" or "name" or "cool name".

There is the meta info about languages. One can filter by that. It is not only something displayed in the info box. https://itch.io/games/lang-ru

Oh, and your game seems searchable again.

The intersting bit about games is, that they are more than the sum of their parts. Simplified you have story+gameplay+eye candy. A kinetic novel removes the gameplay. So it is story+eye candy. If you remove the story, you are left with eye candy. Can this work? Of course. Just like pure gameplay or pure story can work. So if your game only has one of those, it better be not only good, but exceptional.

As for my perspective, why should I play a game with eye candy, if I can play another game that has eye candy plus story plus game play. I am here for games and not for a picture set. 

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After rereading your post, I agree with the advise above. Do not pad out your story, just for it to be longer. A book is not better, just because it has more pages.

I focused on the title of the thread and if you ask how important the story is, I got thinking what happens if you leave the story out.

This is Itch message board. You need to ask on the individual game message board (comment section).

The bug as such might be an accidental rollout of a test version of the site or whatever.

But the thing itself is kinda very specific and done in a way not consistent to the other applications of css on Itch. All the Itch css is in files. That grey thingy is injected in the html itself.

What worries me is lack of official response. For site issues, leafo is often quite quick to say something about it.

If you do nsfw stuff, you might want to advertise at dedicated nsfw places. Neither of your mentioned sites is such a place.

I sure hope this is a prank or a side effect. Like, they wanted to greyscale some part of the page to give those 0% cheapskates a sad smiley face.

Because doing it this way is not not only unprofessional, it creates support issues. In other words: it costs money because people not reading this thread will open a support ticket.

If they want to encourage more money flow by this, as a user I would like to see a tip to Itch button where payments are made. Right next to those buttons.

Support the developer by paying above the minimum price

+$1.00 +$2.00 +$5.00 +$10.00

I feel like on Itch, more people choose cover images that showcase their game graphics

You might be able to test your hypothesis on these and similar lists' top pages.

https://itch.io/games/top-rated/tag-deck-building

https://itch.io/games/top-sellers/tag-deck-building

Most devs here do not have a budget, so no professional cover art. The cheapest way to have such an image is to take a screenshot from the game. So, while I do agree that gameplay pic is often used, I do not feel that this is done, because people think it increases success, but out of necessity.

Of course there could be a feedback loop, if regular users would expect their favorite games to do similar. Hence my suggestion to see if your observation holds true for your target audience.

Personally, I am on the fence about this. I would react to certain key elements. Seeing that this is a card game at first glance would peek my interest more than seeing that it is a horror game. But if I am interested in card games, I probably already would use a tag like deck building which would nullify that benefit.

But I think this is the high art of marketing psychology ;-)

(can't reply bug again.)

I spot some widget.dark_theme for that layout selector or whatever that is. Do you have that <style> element on all pages or only on dashboard? Same for the iframe.

It just feels like some hacky way of trying to do dark mode where dark mode is not possible. I am not versed enough in css to understand what that iframe does. It is just strange that I do not have both elements at all.

Oh, and dark mode from within Itch's settings works just fine on my system.

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So the iframe might be an inactive icon, as it says on the tin. It might be unrelated to the greyness.

For the greyness, if it is on mobile too and the Itch app, that is very strange. Also, because it is in the body and not in the css file.

In my dashboard is neither that body style segment, nor that hidden iframe.

Do you maybe have an extension that tries to force dark mode or something like that? I ask because <style> elements are not typical for Itch. All the css is in a css file.

You might have missed the "Add External file" option to the right of "Upload files". You can integrate such files directly into the download area.