itch.io

VNDB.org might be able to help you.

What is the point of a survey that asks basically one real question, that question being "do you agree that the problem i am going to solve is super duper important"?

For the record, this is like the third "game discovery platform" i've seen announced on this forum this month alone, and they all have the same two problems: a) they have no idea for how to address the fact that there are a lot of games, and b) they all ignore the problem that no normal person is going to visit a special website that exists specifically for "game discovery" when they already can "discover" games on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Bluesky, Mastodon, Steam, Epic, itch.io, and a variety of other storefronts. I'd be very interested in hearing how you plan to address these two points.

If you have actual evidence that you were deceived about what you bought (e.g. an AI disclosure containing lies) and itch.io support does not react in a timely fashion (they usually don't), I would highly recommend filing a complaint with your payment provider / credit card company and, if possible, issue a chargeback. Only way they're gonna learn.

If the old asset simply does not have any information on whether it includes AI, then I guess you can hope itch.io gives you a refund out of courtesy but aside from that, there is nothing you can do except exercise more due diligence in the future before buying.

If it was NSFW and had any monetization enabled: yeah, then it is deindexed and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

I haven't heard of this game, unfortunately. Sorry.

Maybe you can find it on vndb.org.

They also may be more likely to use Do Not Track settings or similar - not sure how that affects itch metrics. Fediverse peeps tend to be pretty privacy minded.

Also, I doubt either of us gets thousands of impressions on their toots on Mastodon. So I'm not really comfortable in making definite statements about the CTR on Mastodon. I don't have any data to base such statements on. (And for the record, I think the lack of analytics on Mastodon is a good thing because it is a social network, not an advertising platform. I treat it as a platform where I can talk about my games with interested peeps but I try not to think of that as "advertising".)

Okay, so who should we tell and how do we reach them?

"itch.io staff seldom communicates the reasons for a delay or decision"

If you are holding the money that people have earned on your site and ignoring time commitments your company has set itself, maybe the reasons for that should be communicated? Because letting people stay in the dark about where their money is for a month, sometimes longer, without any apology or progress update, seems to me like something a serious, trustworthy business does not do.

This message has two parts.

The snarky part: It's been over 9 months since the last time you gave us any update in this matter. As an adult game dev who would like to at least set up a tip jar, it would be really nice to get any indication that you are making progress in regards to allowing paid adult content to be indexed, or that you are at least still trying to find a solution, because right now it feels like you just do not care about us. There are some adult game creators on this site about whom I care deeply, and they are the reason I am on this site to begin with, and I hate seeing them be screwed over like this.

The non-snarky part: I'm curious if you'd consider accepting Wero payments at some point in the future.

Second post today that misgenders me - not sure if the first one was in this thread or the other one, but it sure is annoying! :3

For the record, I am a professional software dev and have followed AI development since around the time of Robo-Rosewater (google that, it's fun). There is definitely a point arguing with me but you have to have, well, actual arguments. Being confused about what words mean is not an argument.

And I am not sure how the fact that I put time and effort into my games (Collared Maid has been in the works for about two and a half years at this point) means my opinion is less valid than that of rebshmueltoys, someone who churns out a ton of AI-generated games and pretends to be an Actual Creative. (I remember that incident where you lied on one of your games' product page, claiming it didn't contain AI, then I called you out on it, you added the AI disclosure and pretended it had always been there and called me an idiot who can't read. Good times.) 

On the other hand, I would very much appreciate if AI bros stopped arguing with me!

The code in the original post had empty lines between every word when I wrote it. The forum software ate it.

IMO, whitespace in code blocks ought to be preserved verbatim. I format my code as to maximize readability, and if I share it on this forum, any attempt of the software to clobber whitespace is only going to reduce readability.

I could, of course, post a screenshot of my code instead, but that means nobody can copy&paste my code if they find it helpful.

(I also had trouble writing this comment because when I submitted it, Cloudflare decided my session needed to be reverified.)

this
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> I forgot the "a" before forum and the last "f" of "off" too. 

I generally do not care about spelling mistakes because, y'know, some people aren't native speakers (I'm not) and some are legasthenics. The one exception I make is when people try to pretend they are knowledgeable about a topic while not knowing its basic terminology.

> No one said anything about awareness or emergence.

You said that LLMs consist of matrices but are more than that. This phenomenon is called "emergent behaviour" - complex behaviour emerging out of simple building blocks.

You also said that the user is part of an LLM's world - your words, not mine. Having "a world", a sense of internality, implies awareness.

Please don't say things, then claim you never said them.

>  If you can't recognize when someone boils down a complex subject and uses metaphor to communicate function to a general audience, then I'd call you a professional programmer  :)

The problem is that a bunch of people genuinely do believe that LLMs are sentient, self-aware, capable of independent thought and agency and emotion et cetera pp.

It is hard to tell if someone is using a metaphor if a bunch of other people genuinely say exactly the same thing and mean it 100% literally.

Also I am pretty confident that you actually did mean those things literally. Nice try at backpedaling and sneaking in a personal insult ("actually you are too stupid to communicate"), though. It's a solid strategy, albeit not an original one.

> Also, I know what a Matrices is.

It's a matrix. The singular of "matrices" is "matrix".

> And if you comprehended them in context with the orchestra of other things that make up the end-user's experience when using generative AI then you'd know that anyone who starts of explaining anything to do with AI as "just a bunch of..." isn't as educated in the matter as they'd have others believe.

I know what "emergent behaviour" is. That doesn't mean that a bunch of matrices are suddenly self-aware and the person who is feeding input data into them is "part of their world". That is esoteric mumbo-jumbo.

> We've got no idea what they're working on. Might be slop. Might be the AI mona lisa :P

It doesn't really matter if you make the worst AI slop, or the best AI slop, because it is AI slop regardless. AI is a) intrinsically uncreative and b) plagiarizes with impunity. If I download the Mona Lisa from Wikipedia, print it on a poster and claim that I painted it, that would not make me a great artist. If you use AI to steal from other artists, the same thing goes: the result is not yours and it does not matter how good it is.

> I dunno man... I read the OP and I read your stuff and I feel like you're doing a pretty good job of proving that might not be true. Just sayin.

Stealing from other artists, spamming your AI slop in communities that categorically do not want to see it, and then whinging about it online are bad things even if you use polite language to talk about them.

Being polite does not make you morally justified, and if you do something shitty and other people get angry about it, that does not suddenly turn you from the perpetrator to the victim.

> Haha, dang man. That "Ratsnake Games" fellow is in all the AI posts raging. I don't think that guy is giving any kind of sincere feedback

First off, I am not a guy.

Second off, I am 100% sincere when I say that I do not care about OP's AI slop, especially considering that OP does not care either.

Third off, you following me into different threads just to diss me because you disagreed with me in another thread seems awfully harassment-y to me.

> Whenever you are interacting with an AI model, you are half of it's world.

AI models are a bunch of fancy matrices. Matrices do not have a world, and you are not half of it.

> An AI, not the chat bot, not the model, but the AI itself is only actually there in the moment it is doing a task.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

"AI" is a category of programs. GPTs (also referred to as Large Language Models colloquially, or sometimes as chatbots, although all of these terms mean slightly different things) are generally considered a form of AI.

When you are interacting with ChatGPT or other GPTs, there is no magical entity called "AI" that is distinct from the GPT. The GPT *is* the AI. Everything else you say here is completely meaningless nonsense.

> That probably sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo

It is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. There is no scientific grounding to it and it has nothing to do with how so-called "AI" actually works and you are embarrassing yourself.

So I've started building a colony builder. That should be an easy project to knock out in two months or so. Right? Right???

My game will have an adult twist, but since the forums are intended to be all-ages spaces, I am not going to discuss the adult parts of this here. I think it is still worth writing a devlog because a lot of the implementation choices might still be of interest and there will be a large chunk of base-level mechanics that have nothing to do with the NSFW stuff.

So what did I do until now?

Choosing an engine

This was already a pretty big task. I wanted to learn a new engine since Godot has started to accept AI contributions a while ago (albeit reluctantly). Bevy seemed like a nice option - it is AI-free, the dev team seem reasonable, and I have been eyeing Rust for a while now.

Unfortunately, Bevy is still very new and it is very different from Godot. I tried to build a small prototype with it and worked on that for a few days but everything just took far too long. Bevy does not have the same amount of third-party documentation Godot does, and it often requires you to think about your game very differently (since it strictly enforces an ECS pattern). So I eventually decided to go back to Godot, with a bit of grumbling.

For a bit, I tried to use GDScript (since that is the only language that allows for web exports and itch.io really likes web games), like I did with Ratsnek, a jam game from 2023. But with its fairly loose type system, doing any sort of refactoring just tends to blow up in your face and I do not want to spend my time troubleshooting typos, so eventually I bit the bullet and switched to C#. I think that'll be the final tech stack, and by the time I will be done, maybe Godot will be able to export C# games to web. Who knows.

The game so far

In my experience, starting off your game by trying to find third-party assets that kinda-sorta fit your vision well enough for prototyping is pretty bad. I need to get to the fun stuff - for me, that's programming - relatively quickly. I could have used one of the tilesets from itch but decided to make my own programmer art because, surprisingly, it is just faster.

(The itch.io forums are doing evil things to my poor little screenshot. Right-Click and "Show Picture in New Tab" should show it to you in the correct aspect ratio. Thanks!)

I can also just mock up any asset I want very quickly.

Aspects like tile size (16x16) and the color palette (a 16-color PC-98 palette) are, of course, pure placeholders and the only reason I went with pixel art to begin with is because it is a medium in which I feel more comfortable doing quick&dirty mockups. Integrating third-party assets or commissioning my own / collaborating with artists will wait until I have more solid ideas about what I actually need.

There already is some basic map generation (based on Perlin noise, scavenged from another prototype I did ages ago - never throw away your abandoned projects!) and, as you can see, the player can place buildings which will then be built by the characters.

Simon Says Build A House

By genre convention, you don't just select one of your minions and tell them to go build a house - rather, you place objects like you would in an RTS and your characters will then start building them when, y'know, they feel like it and don't have anything better to do.

The way I model this so far is through this neat little class:

using Godot;
public abstract partial class BehaviourTask : RefCounted {
    public virtual TaskState State { get; protected set; } = TaskState.RUNNING;
    public virtual bool NeedsRequeueOnCancel() {
        return false;
    }
    public abstract void ActUpon(Gril gril, float delta);
    public enum TaskState {
        RUNNING,
        FINISHED,
        /// <summary>
        /// needs requeue
        /// </summary>
        PAUSED
    }
}

Instances of this class will be tossed into a global command queue. The logic for executing a task is within the BehaviourTask subclass so I can keep my mob classes reasonably lean. There will be many different kinds of tasks and putting all their logic into my mob classes would be an absolute disaster.

For the time being, idle characters just take whatever task is first in the global job queue, but of course more logic will be needed for that because of character preferences, skills and priorities. Certain tasks that are close together should also be batched. But I'll get to that when I get to it.

So far, the tasks are limited to felling trees, hauling items from A to B and building, uh, buildings. Of course, many more will follow, and on top of these global tasks, my characters will also have to take care of self-care - eating, sleeping et cetera.

Shady dithering

In the screenshot above, you can see that my bed and walls are semitransparent. Using the alpha channel here would look out of place in a limited 16-color palette! So instead I dither the furniture sprite, making every other tile transparent.

This was my first-ever shader, and I am very proud of it, even if it is very simple.

shader_type canvas_item;
void fragment() {
    if ((int(UV.x / TEXTURE_PIXEL_SIZE.x) + int(UV.y / TEXTURE_PIXEL_SIZE.y)) % 2 == 0) {
        COLOR = COLOR;
    } else {
        COLOR = vec4(0, 0, 0, 0);
    }
}

Next steps

Some of the next systems I need to implement, now that the building system has a very basic implementation, is character stats. I need a robust system where character stats can be modified by status effects and items in a manner that is flexible, type-safe, robust and decently encapsulated, and I am not yet 100% sure how that will look.

Outro

You can follow me on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@ratsnakegames - I can actually talk about the planned NSFW content there.

The truth is, 99.9999 percent of people have no idea what AI is

... yeah. Sure. Because AI is not actively being shoved down the throat of every single person who interacts with computers or phones on a regular basis.

And, frankly, what kind of person do you think it takes to read what seems like a heartfelt post, then attack a stranger like the guy above me did?

OP is whinging because they are doing something shitty (spamming their AI slop in artist spaces where that AI slop is not wanted) and people are getting mad at them because of it. They are asking everybody else to change their behaviour, because they themselves are not willing to reconsider why spamming AI slop in artist spaces would make actual artists mad.

I do not care how "heartfelt" that is. No matter how deeply OP is convinced that this stance is 100% reasonable, it is a shitty expectation to have. OP is the problem. OP has the option to change, to do actual creative work and be respected for it. They choose not to. They choose to demand of everybody else that they stop criticizing them.

OP is not the victim here.

To answer your question, the kind of person it takes to give such an answer is a person with critical reasoning skills.

But yeah, the internet ain't what it used to be.

Yeah. For one thing, there's AI slop everywhere and all the creative spaces are overrun by AI slop spammers expecting to be taken serious.

If you just generate your stuff via AI, you are not an artist. You're an impostor who wants credit and applause for doing the thing, but instead of actually doing the thing, you rent a machine that steals from actual artists.

So maybe the AI hate does harm you, but it certainly does not harm artists.

What does harm artists is AI grifters sucking all the air out of the room and then having the audacity to pretend that they are the victims in all of this.

What you're describing here is a pretty big project that is going to be very hard to monetize because a) copyright and trademark infringement and b) the r-word.

People aren't just gonna do your idea because you give it away for free (and it's not like "a game where you do naughty things with character X from franchise Y" isn't already well-explored territory). As an adult game dev myself, my problem isn't lack of ideas, it is lack of time and resources to implement the ideas I already have. And if I make a game, I'm gonna put in the things I like and care about, not the things one person on the forum wants.

So the odds of  someone making your game for you, to your specs, is pretty low.

(Unless you happen to have a few ten thousands of eurodollars lying around, I suppose.) 

I also thought discussing these things here was basically forbidden. I've been treading on eggshells whenever I've talked about my game so far. So I'm a bit surprised the mods looked at this and just accepted it tbh. Any chance of clarification on that? Because I, for one, would appreciate having a space where I actually *can* say what my game is called without being scared of the mods.

No, I have a few visits from the Fediverse in my analytics so they aren't getting ignored. But thanks for the offer.

Free tip: Maybe don't have your logo be the letters "SS"

Game searches only show a limited number of results and there is a billion games called "Wake up" or variations thereof... no wonder yours doesn't show up, despite being indexed.

Personally, I do check my analytics every now and then but there isn't too much actionable insight in there. Mostly, they're telling me that my main channel of communication (Mastodon) is largely ineffective for finding an audience.

Oh well.

I do not have any analytics besides what itch shows me. Tracking player behaviour in game just feels shady to me and, especially given the nature of my game, is not something I would be comfortable with.

It genuinely makes me angry to see your ChatGPT slop posts.

It's almost as bad as seeing your obvious AI slop game which you have the goddamn audacity to claim is AI-free, and which itch staff will never do anything about.

I hate sharing a community, a platform, a playing field with people like you. Genuinely hate it. 

Big fan of RAMSER SRLESLY

When I am looking for solutions to a programming problem, YouTube is the last place I look. If you want to share something like this, uploading the script as a Gist or uploading it to itch.io as a game asset is a lot more practical.

Yeah, that's very shady and untrustworthy. I'm not ever gonna use a service that advertises itself that way because it is immediately obvious that the people running it don't have a single shred of professionalism.

I have no idea what you are on about.

a) i have no idea what you are saying

b) why are you doing a release announcement for, like, one screenshot?

You can just do both.

FWIW, I would assume that a native Android app will run smoother than a WebGL build. On the other hand, the process of sideloading an APK from itch.io is a pain and will only become worse in the future due to new restrictions in the Android OS.

If mobile platforms are your main target, I personally would advise getting your game on Google Play and suck up the one-time cost for registering with them.

"ChatGPT, write a response to a thread titled 'How important are game desigerns really?' Make sure to completely ignore the post's actual content."

I'm not itch.io staff.

PDFs can contain viruses and have been a prime mechanism for spreading malware in the past.

Like I said, this will be reviewed by staff eventually but support staff is chronically overworked.

I haven't read that book and I do not think that having faith in doing the right thing is going to change material reality.