itch.io

Yeah, the impetus to writing this manifesto was seeing the absolute unbridled levels of smugness on the manifesto jam submissions list.

It turns out that most of the submissions were being hyperbolic or Socratic or something and weren’t actually being so cynical, but it still filled me with ick, and I had to write something in response to the feelings I got from the titles even if the actual manifestos themselves were fine.

I also ran into the permissions issue. Also it’s useful to do

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Midinous.app

(or use dequarantine to make this process easier long-run)

Haha thanks, it always seems like my best songs are the ones that are born out of the biggest frustrations at the most trivial things.

Yes, exactly! “Be excellent to each other” and a picture of Bill and Ted is the entirety of the code of conduct of one of the gamedev discords I’m on and it’s perfect.

There’s more problems than that but those are the two hardest ones yes.

(Honorable mention also goes to “handling dates and times” which I kind of think is harder than naming things.)

It would be nice if a browser-based game could auto-size without being a Unity game.

As a workaround I’ve added these style rules to my custom CSS:

div.game_frame { max-width: 100%;  max-height: 100%; }

and then set the embed size to be my actual maximum size, but that’s kinda wonky and not super robust. If there were an option within the game’s editor to specify a flexible/maximum size it’d probably work better overall.

It looks like your own submissions don’t always appear in the submission list but clicking on “my submissions” will show it.

It’s weird, I submitted mine too and it shows as a “submission to Manifesto Jam” on the game page but it’s not appearing on the submissions list for me, even after refreshing and sorting by recency and so on. Hopefully it’s just a caching issue!

Hi, I would really like to be able to import data from the public itch website. For example, on my own website I have a section where I link to the various games I’ve worked on, and I’d like to be able to automate keeping that up-to-date.

Unfortunately, it seems that the RSS feeds are extremely limited; for example, I can’t find any way of getting a feed for any of my collections. Scraping the HTML is also not super helpful, as a lot of the data only loads in on-demand via JavaScript, such as things like a game’s publication and update time. There also doesn’t seem to be anything (at least nothing documented) about browsing collections or getting game metadata from the game pages themselves. (Not to mention that the actual structure of the HTML leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to stably scraping things.) Even getting the plain title of a game is a relative nightmare.

Is there something I’m missing, or could this functionality be added in? For example, providing better game metadata in the form of additional OpenGraph tags or JSON-LD or the like, and providing a more complete set of RSS feeds which also provide this metadata.

In particular, I’m looking to be able to get the following from a game:

• Title
• Date of publication and last update
• Contributors/project admins (for credit purposes)
• Item type (game, soundtrack, comic, etc.)

and ideally being able to get that in bulk, or at least a raw listing of games’ IDs and/or URLs, from a collection.

Even if this stuff were added to the itch.io API that would be a huge improvement over what’s currently there.

An RSS feed for a public collection would be super useful.

Awesome! Thank you for adding this and making such a great piece of software. :)

I hadn’t tried the music editor in quite some time and this new one does feel like a huge improvement over what I remember!

One big thing I’d really like to see is the ability to change the keyboard layout in the tracker mode to be more piano-like rather than the chromatic scale mapping that’s currently there, though. Is there any way to change the layout, or any plans to make that possible?

Every tracker I’ve ever used (and I’ve used a lot of them!) lays the note entry keys out like a piano. It makes the flow of composing go really quickly, in my experience.

Also, in the piano roll is there any way to make notes start not exactly on the grid, and have durations other than one grid cell? That’s also pretty fundamental to most music editors, where the grid is more of a snap-to assistance than a rigid set of triggers. I also can’t figure out how to do portamento or arpeggio, but I can understand if those are more complex than what you’re going for in this interface.

I’m glad you could get this working, despite every barrier Apple has put in the way!

FWIW, macOS is just as fine with spaces in filenames as Windows or Linux, but sometimes developers forget to do that on Mac, sometimes with hilariously catastrophic results.

And yeah independent Mac development is a bit of a nightmare these days due to Apple’s disdain for obsolete code and anything that resembles “jailbreaking.” If it weren’t for all of my music software being on macOS I’d be switching to something else (and frankly my music software has gotten super frustratingly buggy lately too so I might be switching to something else anyway).

Also there’s an easier way to dequarantine apps and there’s no reason to disable Gatekeeper entirely for that.

And here I thought when you said you ported the movement code from Fox Flux to Ren’Py you were just joking.

HOW THE HELL DID YOU DO THIS IN RENPY

I do not have the attention span for this style of text adventure anymore but I love the presentation and the fact that there’s a modern Inform dialect that supports graphics and music. I remember back in the day when The Lurking Horror had some (very limited) sound and there were graphical elements in Beyond Zork and Zork Zero, but I’ve not kept up with the modern era of IF.

Anyway the music’s pretty good, if repetitive, and the art has a cool vibe to it. If only I were in a better headspace to actually explore this little world you’ve carved out.

I think the bugs are the only thing in this game which are arguably and demonstrably not fixed

(that is a neutering joke)

When I try playing this through the itch.io app I get an error early on with “Cannot load image big_monster.png” or something to that effect, but it works fine from the web. Weird.

Anyway it’s always a pleasure to make music for these silly games, and Craig is the absolute star of the show here. I hope he gives his paralegal team a bunch of big kisses. Such a cute bean.

I only managed to find one ending though.

This is such a clever concept, and I love how many different weird paths there are to go down. Great music, too. The UX is so weird and disjoint but I think it works well for this, especially with some of the little meta-jokes that show up in places.

The x64 version just crashes when I try to start the game, but the x86 version works just fine. I’m on a Ryzen 9800X and AMD RX 7900XTX, if any of that matters.

Anyway. Galaxian but with dongs is a fitting idea for this jam. It’d be nice if the controls were a bit tighter (that’s what she said) and if I had any idea what the heck I was even doing.

Making a visual novel in RPG Maker 2003 was a curious choice. I’m finding it really difficult to actually control anything because of the too-fast-moving keyboard-only cursor with tiny click targets. I love the art style and music though, and the characters are well-written and each have a very distinct voice, especially the introductory character.

It would definitely be a good idea to re-export this with the RPG Maker runtime included and also tag the bundle as being for Windows, which would make it a lot easier to install and run (particularly from the itch app).

The writing in this feels really disjoint but in a waking dream sort of way (shades of Link’s Awakening and Mulholland Dr), which I absolutely love. I also enjoy the feeling of a mid-90s multimedia point-and-click adventure with the Cutting Edge Computer Graphics™ in the background. I have no idea who/what Gar 28 is, and having a relevant link somewhere in the game description would have been nice.

The music is also great for setting a mood.

UX-wise I’d also like a way of making the text not slowly appear on the screen, and maybe cut down on the time taken by visual transitions as well. Keyboard access would be nice too, and I couldn’t figure out any way of making the settings menu appear while playing.

Jop also seems like a real garbage person [affectionate].

Anyway, this was an interesting experience overall.

I couldn’t get this to run through the itch.io app for some reason, but the webpage lets it play just fine at least. I wasn’t quite sure where to click in order to progress the gameplay parts of the story, though, or how to actually make money in order to do repairs (being on the “collect money” screen it never actually automatically filled up with any coins), and when I tried going to the bar I got a ren’py exception screen.

From what does work I get the impression that this is sort of an idle/clicker game, and implementing that in ren’py is an interesting (and ambitious) idea!

I love the idea of this game, although I find the font kind of fatiguing to read so much text in. Also there’s a lot of lore to absorb, and after a certain point I found myself just clicking through quickly to see if there was ever an interactive branch point, and ended up accidentally clicking on the “wrong answer” one which then, of course, booted me back to the main menu, which kind of felt like I was back in high school English class. If there were at least a “skip forward” button like what ren.py normally allows I’d be a lot more eager to try again.

The music is great and reminds me of the Pixeljunk games on the PS3 (especially Monsters and Eden). I’d love to have a standalone OST to listen to!

EDIT: oh duh I just looked at the credits, the music is by my friend Jeremy, awesome

you have not seen me at my hammiest

Yeah I’ve taken a bit of a step back from Strawberry Jam stuff for a few different reasons that I won’t get into here and this year I was definitely not feeling up to making a lot of music (I was actually planning on taking this year off entirely, after having participated in every previous year to some capacity), but I’m glad that a bunch of people still reached out for music all the same.

I think I need to get better about listing requirements before I’ll commit to making music. I want to be sure that the game’s creators have a chance at actually submitting something (even if it’s incomplete/prototype) and also that we’re on the same page about what kind of stuff they’re looking for, because communication was a big pain point this year.

Yeah I really like working with Kageki! We have a good rapport and I’m always happy to make more music for the Rubber Wizard series.

I love how the eyes follow the mouse cursor

Bandcrash is just producing files to be uploaded anywhere. If your web hosting allows password protecting a directory (via .htaccess or whatever), that’s all you’d need to configure and everything should work. If that’s not enough information then please share what your web hosting situation is and maybe I can provide more information.

As far as “asset pack” that’s down to how you set up the itch project. Make sure you’ve set your project type to “soundtrack.” You can also provide your own custom noun on the project page. You might also want to enable the “auto-play” option so that the run prompt doesn’t appear.

This is actually a pretty low amount of output for me from Strawberry Jam. :) But thanks for listening!

If the first one ended up in a game I’m not aware of it and I’d like to know.

oh yeah I posted it to youtube yesterday

💜

Thanks! My channel is https://youtube.com/@realfakesockpuppet although I haven’t released this album to any of the platforms yet. Usually I release on Bandcamp+Mirlo first and then YouTube comes a bit later (since it’s a bunch more effort).

Fun stuff! I do wish there were an option for instant text appearance though. Even at the highest text speed it feels super slow.

As far as I know I was on mainline previously. Thanks for looking into and fixing this issue!

It looks like when I do butler upgrade it’s still keeping me on dev, though. How do I switch back to mainline?

EDIT: Had to restart the itch app (for some reason the “manage” button wasn’t bringing up anything) but was able to reinstall from there.

Hi, I just updated the Mac version of butler using butler upgrade and the installed version now claims to be:

$ butler --version
head, built on Feb 20 2026 @ 19:34:08

It seems to be working fine but now butler update is requiring --force for further upgrades.

Thank you for everything you’ve done. This decision couldn’t have been easy but it does seem the most logical.

For some reason itch.io has quarantined this, because of supposed “suspicious activity” from you (where that suspicious activity is just you having created the account recently and residing in the USA).

Or maybe the virus embedded in the pdf is a magical mermaid tf virus or something, well anyway I enjoyed the comic.

I can’t even figure out the obligatory introduction puzzle so I have a feeling I’ll be hopeless at the rest of this one.