itch.io

Yeah, tags work great! 

I guess what I'm trying to say is it would be cool if you could do a search where you get more results. Maybe the full title matches first and then the results continue on with more partial matches followed by description matches followed by tag matches or whatever. So have it behave more like a google search and less like an exact keyword match search limited to X results. For me it would be cool to have more results to browse even if they don't match perfectly. Just a suggestion :)

Glad to hear that search is being overhauled. Excited to see what the devs come up with :)

Imagine you visit itch.io for the first time because you heard there are a lot of cool games on there.

How it currently is:

1. You type in "strategy" in the top search bar and hit Enter.
2. You scroll through the 60 results to the bottom of the page.
3.  "Hmm, there really aren't that much strategy games on itch.io." You close the website.

How it should be:

1. You type in "strategy" in the top search bar and hit Enter.
2.  You can continue scrolling and more results will load in until you find an awesome game. (there are 40000 games tagged with 'strategy')

After asking in the forums I now know that the top search bar on itch.io is only for the first 60 exact game name matches. Now this might make sense from an implementation point of view, since exact name matches probably require a special algorithm. But how should users know this and why should they care? They want to scroll and discover more games.

An easy way to improve this would be to load the 60 magic results first. Once the user has scrolled to the bottom continue loading in generic search results. Maybe the same ones a user would see when searching for a tag in the "Browse" page.

Or maybe at least show a button at the bottom that links to the "Browse" page so users can continue their journey. Something like: "Didn't find what you're looking for? Try browsing for the Tag(link)"

Ok, thanks for the help :) Only showing a limited number of results seems like a strange design decision...

I guess just have to hope itch.io improves this sometime in the future. Easiest would be to just add simple keyword search results after the 60 magic results.

If I search for "ww2" my game doesn't show up https://itch.io/search?q=ww2. My game is called WW2 FPS, so it should show up right? I'm sure it used to show up. It also seems there are very few search results for a generic term like ww2.

Link to my game: https://desertfoxdev.itch.io/ww2fps. Directly searching for the title works: https://itch.io/search?q=ww2 fps

I've read https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-indexed and other posts on here, but I couldn't find any information as to why it wouldn't show.

Any help would be appreciated.

Unfortunately running the game in browser is not possible if that's what you mean. It's due to the game engine and technologies used.

That's an awesome video! Thanks for making it :)

I've also uploaded it to OneDrive now. Does that work better for you?

Thanks for checking the framerate :) The game is built with Unreal Engine 5 which uses some new technologies which are very heavy on the frames. On high Lumen global illumination and virtual shadow maps are activated. It looks great, but is really heavy even on the newest GPUs. On low Nanite is still activated which allows using super high poly models and makes developing a lot easier since you don't have to pay attention to poly counts. Considering that the frame rate is not bad for a 1050. With some luck the performance will increase when Unreal Engine is optimized further. It's still very new and not used in many games yet. But I'll still investigate what can be optimized in gameplay code, already have some ideas.

At the start the frame rate might be unstable because of the bots spawning in. I'll try making the bots spawn less quickly which should reduce those hitches. I'll also do some testing to find other events that may be causing frame hitches.

Hey rinixianren, thanks for testing the game :) Would you mind sharing your system specs and the framerate you are getting? Then I can investigate how to optimize.