itch.io

The impression I’m getting with this “game jam” is that your programmer left your team, and you want to audition someone else to replace them, to turn your pre-existing work and IP on a failing team into something you can still sell. You don’t even seem to care what people make, as long as it uses some of your artwork and ideas. But then, why isn’t there a salary aspect to this, only revshare? Why are you pretending that this game jam and the “rewards” aren’t just crowdsourced damage control for your team?

It feels like you’re using this game jam for some kind of roundabout job applications, and that’s actually pretty underhanded. I’d expect the quality of people willing to work with you after the jam to be much lower than if you were honest about what you want and what’s going on here. The art looks good, but dropping a new designer/programmer/team into your project with no knowledge of what you were planning or what the assets were for (and then expecting them to understand everything and solve all your design issues in two weeks!), it’s just rubbing me the wrong way. It speaks to laziness and indifference, and a lack of faith in your ideas. Just trying to make money on what is left over, from a project that didn’t make it.

You might as well just sell an asset pack if this is how you feel. The revshare thing for the winner is just zany. Paying 10% (only on a successful release!) to the people who made your game work is undervaluing their game design IP so much that I’d be worried you’d just steal my ideas if I said no. Any developer worth their salt could take their IP out of this jam and commission someone else to do the final art for much less. And they probably should, because having basic faith in your project and ideas is a necessary minimum for them to see the light of day.

I don’t mean to be overly harsh in what is probably a tough time for your team, but I do not think this game jam is going to go the way you want it to. This just isn’t what game jams are for.

The feature is very close to the original minesweeper, but as someone who plays almost exclusively with the both-click, I can tell you it’s way too finicky right now. In the original version you activate this mode when you press left and right click together regardless of when you release each one, the only way to cancel out of this mode is to drag the mouse to a blank space or entirely off the board before releasing both clicks.

I would much prefer that to a release left click first approach, as the number of times I speed mashed down a row and only half the numbers cleared properly really stopped me from enjoying this version. This is so close to a perfect recreation that I’m really hoping you’ll patch this one mechanic, because I really missed this game and I was so happy to find a faithful clone. It’s excellent right now, it’s just this one mechanic that is different to what I’m used to and expect.

(ignore this) ~~31 seems impossible, there is no way to hit the two red-blue atoms twice each (only your moveable atoms could, and one has no starting position on the board where it can hit two at once). I think I know what you were going for, but shouldn’t it be two moves instead of one?~~

Okay, I beat them all, including 31. Absolutely ingenious how much mileage you got out of these mechanics!

Excellent puzzle game! I had a similar issue on PC (screenshot is identical whenever a level loads the first time, but no crash), and it looks like it’s because the game is reverting the tiles to the default Puzzlescript non-overlapping 5x5px ones. Since you have a couple mods installed for extra height and overlap in your sprites, I’d check that code. It might be the sprite_size from PuzzleScriptPlus interfering with the variable sprite heights from PuzzleScript#.

I may take a look at this myself at some point, because the mods you used are pretty great. Will let you know if that leads anywhere, as I can consistently replicate this bug.

I really appreciate the reply, I was starting to worry I was shadowbanned or something. I’m trying to remember that there are real people behind this and everyone’s doing their best, but was getting extremely frustrated after weeks of no contact.

Hopefully this brings attention to the fact that something isn’t working though, because I think this is a recent issue as Itch grows more than anything else. I have faith your team will sort it out, just wanted to offer what advice I could, to avoid future people getting frustrated the way I did.

I think there are requirements to not show any adult content in thumbnails though, so why would that matter? I strongly dislike opt-in because it limits visibility to the adult audience as well, many of which do not log in when incognito, etc. Thumbnails are the advertisement, blurring them is making a judgment call on what content should be advertised. The age gate when you click should be plenty.

Thinking about this more, here’s what I’d suggest changing as soon as possible. I think the main issue is the https://itch.io/support page, because it has a catch-all email and a few narrow solutions below that. This is creating one big opaque queue for almost everything else, with a fingers crossed approach that some of the other text below will be read, to alleviate a tiny amount of message flow.

I’d redo that page immediately, and add these things:

1. A publicly visible number of the current count of requests in the queue. Maybe also how many were handled over the last few days, so we can get a sense of the time-frame for support right now.

2. Hiding the support email address behind a small survey-like system, for organizing requests and solving common problems immediately. All of the other information on that page could go into this. (i.e. “Feedback or problem?” > “Are you a player or developer?” > “Is your problem related to…”) Then you can only show the support@itch.io email address if the survey fails to resolve the question, and it’s more likely people will read through and organize themselves. Add as much as you can to this survey later, every extra answer reduces load on the system.

3. Unique email addresses for specific kinds of support. At a minimum, dev-support@itch.io and shop-support@itch.io. You could also possibly do this via title filtering, with codes that the survey gives you at the end with the contact email. As in “Please add ‘D105 Requesting CSS Access’ to the title of your email, to help us resolve your issue more quickly.”

Of course, none of this helps with the underlying problems of the currently unsorted and overloaded queue. But that gives you a starting point for bandaging this from further breakage, and makes the support delays more transparent for the time being.

The next thing I’d suggest is sorting all requests that don’t need back-and-forth contact into separate lists, and maybe making it someone’s full time job to just organize the current queue for a couple weeks. Then assembly-line the rest of support, so they encounter similar tasks as often as possible. I’m sure there’s more that could be done, but this would be a start.

I think there’s a lot that can be done quickly and would help tremendously with the current support delays, which seem to be happening to a lot of people right now. The lack of any contact for weeks is probably causing many duplicate requests in the queue as well.

Okay, this is my first time dealing with support (via support@itch.io), and suffice to say that the experience has been extremely negative. So far I have loved everything about this community, but I had a very basic request and haven’t heard anything back from them in TWO FULL WEEKS. Compared to other retail outlets that host video games, Itch support is officially the worst one.

Since turnover is listed as 1-3 days, I submitted a new request, assuming I got lost somewhere in the shuffle. Apparently in the ten days between, some 1200+ requests were added. This is likely the issue: there aren’t enough people handling support, and there’s no system in place for organizing requests by complexity. If the support team is just going through tickets one by one, that’s absolutely the wrong way to do this.

I’d strongly recommend you look into this, because when you’re significantly worse than Valve/Steam at something, that really leaves a bad impression. If support has become overloaded to the point of breakage, I feel like an automated system should be in place, that updates you via email every so often on what position you are in the queue. As well as sorted requests, because simple ones that require very little effort to resolve should go through ASAP.

I literally just wanted CSS access on my account, to fix a few margins and float an image div in a game jam page. The hoop jumping and extreme delays to get that basic functionality has really soured me on trying to interact with support at all. My game jam needs time to be approved and go live, so I can’t just wait months for these features to get enabled. And when the pages say that turnover is 1-3 days, that lack of transparency and communication is particularly frustrating.

I want to float a narrow image div on a game jam page, so text shows up next to it. I set up a div (with a “custom-something” class name to avoid getting stripped out, and a “float:right;” style), and it looks fine in the edit page’s preview window. However, when I go to the real preview page, the style is completely removed.

The div itself shows up fine on this page, with the proper class name, it’s just the style that’s missing. That means you get a very narrow image with a huge blank space next to it, and all the text is below, which is not ideal. So is there another way to add inline images, next to a few paragraphs of text?

Also, I did try to request access to the CSS editor by contacting Itch support (I’m ticket #115155), but it’s been 12 days now without any kind of response from them at all. I’m looking for a backup option here, and hoping there’s a way to just do this very simple thing without that access going through. I can’t really wait a month or two to get access, because the game jam needs time to get approved and let people join it. I’m considering bad ideas like pre-rendering all the text in a larger image, which I’m really not happy with.

Managed to get to the tan sky color, but dang is this game hard without coyote time. It seems like only jumping when the clouds are moving upwards is a good strategy to avoid missed jumps though.

Very impressive that many of the random jumps were hard but still within the realm of possibility. It never felt like an area was impossible to beat, just very close to that. :P

This is so incredible! Very nice work getting these graphics in a tweetcart.

That last puzzle was quite tricky! I got M:24 by planning out my moves in advance, not sure if anyone can improve that further. Great puzzle concept!

That is… wow… great job! I didn’t even think that was possible, you must be using all kinds of techniques to combat the element of randomness. That’s nearly double my best score, don’t think I can compete with that, lol.

Thank you, I like it too! My current high score is 81, I’ll be very impressed if anyone can beat that. :)

Really nice little game, and the visuals are very well incorporated into gameplay. My high score is only 11, I’ll have to practice more.

I appreciate the hidden “l337” in your code, too. :)

Thank you! The number at the top is your score (next to BOREcode) – it’s how many laser falls you’ve survived this run. Could’ve maybe put the score in the text box too, but I liked having the character say “oh no!” instead, lol.

Also yeah, all those big numbers have to be exact. I tried for a while to consolidate them and it wasn’t working, they’re all related to each other so they can’t be the same. The N variable at the top was the best I could do, and I even had to make an if(y<128) into a y<=n to keep the game working. Unfortunate consequence of all the action being at the bottom of the screen… If I could redo this I’d probably make the lasers fall up, so all the number constants would be small.