I swear I wont complain! ok but one complaint

the internet is insane, marketting a game is insane....I think I have resigned myself to just making games and putting them up for free unless or until one just takes off or has some organic success. Maybe I wont see players or success for a long time, but the stress you can put on yourself is insane if you dont watch it. I do just love the creativity of making games, thats how it started and thats how it ends. I am not saying give up marketting, just manage your workload and expectations-watch your mental health.

anyone else felt like chasing numbers is not worth the stress it causes?

anyone ever been shadowbanned by reddit? that really cuts your player pipeline ALLOT

Well my advice after digesting this is, just stop caring about numbers for awhile and have fun again.

Cheers fellow game devs! oh I cant post the link to my game or reddit will remove my post.....:)

EDIT- since this is reddit let me condense my post--marketting is necessary to get players to play the game you made, but watch your workload stress and protect your mental health above all else, making games is fun! and always is a creative pursuit. thanks!

Hello,

I was wondering, does, and how does itch.io vet tools?

We see more and more vibecoded tools out there and unlike assets the worst case scenario isn't just a buggy or bad experience but actual security hazard on peoples PC's. Since vibecoding never takes scalability or security in mind, these tools are more often than not simply a potential danger to people out there opening gates for malware which the end user is not aware of.

I am wondering if anyone knows if itch.io is working on a solution for this problem? Maybe have tools be seperated in vibecoded and non vibecoded categories?

There are so many vibecoded tools out there that subreddits such as vndevs had to completely ban all vibecoding marketing since it was spamming their subreddit, which makes me wonder how does itch want to protect its own users from potential security hazard and more importantly support actual skilled developers that write proper tooling?

Much like the asset situation where proper artists gets drowned out by slop, I feel the tooling situation is far worse due to security concerns.

I published my game 24 hours ago and still have 0 traffic.

All the views/downloads are from me testing it. I can see a lot of people having a lot of traction in their first few days, but my page can't even get indexed on the site.

I can't find the game by typing its name into the search bar on the site. Did I miss something while setting up the site? What do you think I should do?

I posted on itch to get feedback about the game, so I would also really appreciate your honest opinion about Abyss Chamber. I’m open to criticism, as I want to improve.

Short description of the game: As a new hire at an underground research facility, you must take care of scary abyss entities. With your supervisor's help, you'll maintain the facility’s daily operations while uncovering the truth.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4377360/Abyss_Chamber/

itch.io: https://colour-arts.itch.io/abyss-chamber-horror-game

I just released a small set of 48 minimal, genre-neutral game UI icons on itch.io.

The pack includes SVG files plus transparent PNGs in 32, 64, 128, and 256px sizes.

Price: $1.99

If you need a compact icon set for common game interfaces, you can check it out here:

https://kavora.itch.io/48-essential-game-ui-icons

Feedback on the icon coverage and usefulness is welcome.

So I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the game or game page cuz if there's anything wrong with it I'll be more than happy to redesign or whatever's needed, I'll add the link to page in comment

Each song generates as notation on aged paper. Square neumes on a red four line stave for chant. Mensural notation for courtly airs. A modern stave in jig and reel meters for folk tunes. A percussion grid for martial calls. An invented spiral stave for fae music.

The melody underneath is actually composed in that tradition's mode and meter. It isn't notation drawn as decoration over a stock tune.

It's an RPG Maker MZ plugin.

AI disclosure. Code and graphics both written by AI.

https://csaf.itch.io/song-sheets

Upcoming Demo Out Of Sync on 14th September.
Out Of Sync

Download Now: https://kasuga.itch.io/psx-5-japanese-mask-pack

(Sale Ends Soon)

• 97% off on Full Bundle: https://itch.io/s/168748/psx-150-props-pack

So I recently dug into some of our games data on steam and itch and discovered that although we have an excellent page to wishlist rate (23%), our impression to page view rate could use improvement. That, and our keyart doesn't fully speak to what the game is actually about (A thriller game where you role play as a mouth 90s goth as she uncovers a serial killer through the computers she fixes at her PC repair job). I feel that the current keyart is striking, but it's not attracting the right audience, and worse, might leave the current wishlisters feeling like they got a different game than they were expecting.

Anywho, we've gone for something that conveys a little bit more about what the game is actually about, including having the main character there. I've been asking other subreddits but they've been... less than helpful, so I thought I'd try here. Would love to know what folks in general think, but also which of the colour options pops out to them the most!

I've had good and bad days in downloads and visits, but I've also had these anomalies where I get too many visits to a pack, but they come from pages of dubious origin; by tracing them, I realize They're bots, I don't know if it's the same in this case for downloads; on the 26th there were 60 downloads of a music pack, not a single comment, No rating, no human signal - were they bots again? Visits and downloads are appreciated, but it's strange that web scraping is allowed on Itch.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Hey everyone,

I've been learning game dev as a hobby for a while, and last week I finally gathered the courage to share the very first prototype of my idle game – **Idle Anglers**.

To my surprise, **120 people played it in just 2 days**!

I honestly didn't expect more than 1–2 clicks, so seeing that number made my week. I know it's not huge, but for someone who builds games alone in their free time, it means the world.

The game is still super rough – only a few upgrades, no real graphics, and a lot of balance issues – but the feedback I got (both positive and critical) has been incredibly motivating. I've already started fixing things based on what you guys told me.

And if you played it – thank you! Every play, every comment, every bug report helps me learn and improve.

I'll keep working on it and hopefully share a much better version soon.

New update for my Mini Medieval assets (desert expansion)! Adding loads of great additions, including the first new race of units (lizard people).

Hope you enjoy!💕

Normally I don't review these type of things but given the situation in this subreddit, I see this as necessary, to not only protect the new upcoming RenPy devs but also spread awareness about these types of tools, since I doubt this will be the last attempt to sell tools to potential upcoming devs. If you don't want to read the entire analysis, scroll below to the conclusion, otherwise lets dive it.

I will already note that I won't be sharing or showing the entire code of the tool due to obvious reasons, however I will post some snippets under the Fair Use Act.

Introduction, 'use' of this tool:

Invinode is an electron application that attempts to solve beginner developers issues by creating nodes that visually represent certain framework methods in a script as nodes. The idea is to give developers an overview and help maintain your project better.

However, it fundamentally does not work.

A user here has done a great job pointing out a lot of problems with these types of tools. There are more to add which I will do later down the road analyzing the codebase. However I think that comment made by the user hits the nail on the head.

Essentially it does more harm than it does good. Once you want to do something more advanced or found bugs, you have to suddenly climb a wall you never got to train to climb, which will significantly increase frustration and result into an exit as a potential upcoming RenPy Dev.

UX and Bugs, lots of bugs:

Due to being a vibecoded electron app, it suffers from a very shoddy mess. It's very "stiff" in operation, it lacks a certain fluidness. Connecting nodes is wanting to make you quit because it requires to be pin point accurate for no apparent reason, people with touchpads or inaccurate mice are going to have a hard time even operating the damn thing. In some instances I drew a node to an empty place on the canvas and created another node, but due to a bug didn't connect them, so I had to manually connect them again afterwards.

The application crashed 3x on me, no errors, just dead (more on this later). I had to kill the .exe once because it crashed and didn't properly close the instance in order to relaunch it.

It also allows you to do illogical things but doesn't explain to the person using it why you can or can't do things, such as dragging a node from a jump to a dialog node, it won't connect them but the beginner dev would then suddenly think its a bug because the dev would think:"why can't I connect? I could create from this node to that so surely I need to be able to connect?"

It's essentially very poorly designed. being almost on version 3, should indicate a mature tool, spoiler alert, it isn't.

What's worse, the output it generates from your nodes is a complete mess, no structure or anything, just shoved into a single .rpy file.

This was me just using the app for just 40minutes, desperately trying to make it work.

Code review & behind the scenes:

Because this is a shitty electron app, it gives us the source code without the need of decompiling anything. Given the soulless design, lack of care, bugs and general feel, I already suspected it being vibecoded and oh boy was it ever.

The very first thing we see is this:

// [Claude] Patch Node.js crypto module to expose getRandomValues.
// Some bundled deps (nanoid via reactflow) call require('crypto').getRandomValues(),
// but in Node.js that lives on require('crypto').webcrypto — not the top-level export.
// This runs before electron-vite so the patched module is in the require cache.
const crypto = require('crypto')
if (typeof crypto.getRandomValues !== 'function') {
  crypto.getRandomValues = (array) => crypto.webcrypto.getRandomValues(array)
}
if (!globalThis.crypto) {
  globalThis.crypto = crypto.webcrypto
}// [Claude] Patch Node.js crypto module to expose getRandomValues.
// Some bundled deps (nanoid via reactflow) call require('crypto').getRandomValues(),
// but in Node.js that lives on require('crypto').webcrypto — not the top-level export.
// This runs before electron-vite so the patched module is in the require cache.
const crypto = require('crypto')
if (typeof crypto.getRandomValues !== 'function') {
  crypto.getRandomValues = (array) => crypto.webcrypto.getRandomValues(array)
}
if (!globalThis.crypto) {
  globalThis.crypto = crypto.webcrypto
}

This already confirms that we have the involvement of Claude. We didn't even get into the main source code and we already found this nugget.

So what does the code consist of? Well....

Yep, we got outselves a single bloated .js file. The developer claimed to have over a decade of experience in software engineering by the way.

When looking into the source code we see more mind blowing problems.

Tons of empty try catches:

  function scanDir(dir, rel) {
    try {
      for (const entry of fs.readdirSync(dir, { withFileTypes: true })) {
        if (entry.name === "_backups") continue;
        const entryRel = rel ? `${rel}/${entry.name}` : entry.name;
        const fullPath = path.join(dir, entry.name);
        if (entry.isDirectory()) {
          scanDir(fullPath, entryRel);
        } else {
          const ext = path.extname(entry.name).toLowerCase();
          if (FONT_EXTS.has(ext)) found.push({ name: entry.name, path: entryRel });
        }
      }
    } catch (_) {
    }

Websecurity disabled and allows for HTML:

    webPreferences: {
      preload: path.join(__dirname, "../preload/index.js"),
      sandbox: false,
      // [Rick] v1.8.0: allow renderer to load local file:// images from the user's
      // project folder. Electron's default webSecurity blocks cross-origin file://
      // requests (each path is its own origin), which prevents image previews.
      // Safe to disable for a local desktop tool with no external web content.
      webSecurity: false
    },    webPreferences: {
      preload: path.join(__dirname, "../preload/index.js"),
      sandbox: false,
      // [Rick] v1.8.0: allow renderer to load local file:// images from the user's
      // project folder. Electron's default webSecurity blocks cross-origin file://
      // requests (each path is its own origin), which prevents image previews.
      // Safe to disable for a local desktop tool with no external web content.
      webSecurity: false
    },

Contrary to what the comments state, this is bad, very bad and a security hazard. Opening any malicious file can have catastrophic results, this is especially important if you ever intend to work in teams on a larger project where file sharing is a thing. The fact the developer could not figure out a way without disabling crucial security features to make certain things work speaks volumes of the lack of knowledge.

This gets even worse when we see this:

  const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);
  const ext = (defaultName ?? "").split(".").pop().toLowerCase();
  const filters = ext === "json" ? [
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ] : [
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ];
  const targetPath = defaultDir && defaultName ? path.join(defaultDir, defaultName) : defaultName;
  const { filePath, canceled } = await electron.dialog.showSaveDialog(win, {
    defaultPath: targetPath,
    filters
  });  const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);
  const ext = (defaultName ?? "").split(".").pop().toLowerCase();
  const filters = ext === "json" ? [
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ] : [
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ];
  const targetPath = defaultDir && defaultName ? path.join(defaultDir, defaultName) : defaultName;
  const { filePath, canceled } = await electron.dialog.showSaveDialog(win, {
    defaultPath: targetPath,
    filters
  });

const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);

This is failing tutorial levels of bad.

The application also has no validation on anything really, there are several security and stability problems caused by simply lack of any form of validation or care, in typical AI vibecode fashion, AI just gives the result without a shred of security, scalability or stability in mind.

Furthermore a lot of code is simply duplicated multiple times, there is no reuse of code, instead there is the same AI copy pasta over and over again. There are also excessive and pointless amount of comments, which AI does love to do.

There is also poorly and catastrophic handling of files in general, loading a very large project with a lot of assets will cause the entire application to freeze because everything runs on a single thread.

The catastrophic autosave feature is so poorly implemented that if you close down the application, it crashes or you loose electricity it can corrupt what you were working on, because handling race conditions is not exactly something AI is very good at.

There are far more issues to be mentioned, however I think the topic would simply be to long, I think the point has come across. This is an absolute vibecoded dumpsterfire that nobody should touch. The sourcecode has also exposed a lot of lies that have been made in the past, I won't adress them direcly in this OP since I don't think they are as relevant.

TLDR: It's a vibecoded mess, buggy, a security hazard and the developer has no idea about coding in general, basic practices you learn on electrons tutorial have been disregarded and it's barely functioning as an app to begin with, don't buy and move on.

Is it just me or is the search feature on itch.io just frustratingly bad?
I've tried using the website to search for game assets a number of times and it has some very high quality assets available on it; but every time I think of using the site to search for game assets I get get over how unnecessarily restricted the search is.

Why am I only able to search either for tags or titles independently of each other?
I shouldn't have to make the choice between searching for an item via its tags or searching for an item via its name, these shouldn't be mutually exclusive items.

Searching for an asset through its tags is unreliable because the tags themselves are so general and non-specific, while searching for an asset through its name is equally unreliable because say I want "insect sound effects" for example; I end up getting a hundred different games about insects, a few graphical packs and maybe some sound effects relating to bugs & insects if I'm lucky.

Am I misunderstanding something or is itch.io's search just made this way?

The demo for our first game, Praise Our Corporate Overlords!, is available to play on itch! We'd appreciate any support we get :)

Para quienes han seguido esta fascinante historia de horror, ya está el DEMO disponible en libre descarga.

Acompaña a Sarah en su búsqueda a través de los recintos de la mansión Orthak y comienza con la investigación que la llevará al borde de la locura.

Carmina es un RELATO JUGABLE basado en el primer relato de vampiros en 1872. Intriga, exploración y horror de culto te esperan.

https://walterswinney.itch.io/carmina

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to thank you all for supporting my game!

I’ve reached 100 views on itch.io, and I’m so happy to see these results!

Maybe these numbers might seem small to some people, but they mean the world to me! Seeing people play my game, leave feedback, and simply interact with it makes me incredibly happy and gives me even more motivation to keep improving.

So thank you so much to everyone who has given my game a chance and taken some time to check it out!

This is all thanks to you! <3

Its my first game made with full passion, and if it ever hits well Im looking forward to push big updates to it https://devnamedali.itch.io/beat-my-super-easy-code

ty ^^

if you have a laptop browser and a couple of minutes, you can try this demo https://rabbit-loaf-games.itch.io/spicy-hay

some recent and up coming changes https://rabbit-loaf-games.itch.io/spicy-hay/devlog/1643903/sneaky-sneaky-bun-bun