itch.io

Update: I've been poking around the Distribute page and discovered the "Direct link? Use this link to go directly to your game" feature, which generates exactly what I want - what appears to be a static game URL without the creator username. And it doesn't include the View All/Follow overlays either! Perfect!

This thread can be closed.

You yourself pointed out the problem with using the URL shortener when you suggested using the URL shortener and pointed out that the username is still visible in the final URL after the game loads. I don't want that. I would like a custom URL for the game page, a URL without the username. I realise now I was less than clear about that, but I also think I provided enough information for you to understand what I mean, and you dismissed that information because you don't understand why someone would want that.

I see from your questions that we're on completely different pages about the needs of this event. I'd just like to point out that I deliberately said "a Secret Santa-type thing" - it was meant to convey broad strokes, not imply every detail is the same. I'll explain more.

> Is this maybe some blind jam thing or similar?

I've done game jams but not blind game jams so maybe.

Imagine a game jam event where instead of making a game (just) for a theme, you specifically tried to make some other participant's dream game for that participant, and some other participant (whose identity you do not know) tried to make your dream game. You get (say) a month to do it, you post by the deadline and then the gifts are revealed. However, for the first week of the games being revealed, you don't know who made what. This serves several purposes: the mystery is fun (and the guessing game is fun, based on people's signature styles and little tells), and creator-blind enjoyment of the games helps form more objective opinions. While the game you made was for one specific person, you usually look at other people's gift games, too, because odds are high that other people made games you like even if they weren't made specifically for you. Then creator reveals happen and you go "Wow, my gift game was made by someone who's never made a platformer before, but it's so good!" or "I had no idea my gift game was made by a close friend". And then (optionally) you go and see what other things they made, if you really liked their work. That's why the work should both be public and (ideally) be on the same account as your other works.

The intent is not to distance oneself from one's work permanently and completely, it's only temporary. If I gift someone a game and they don't know it's me, but they open a page with the URL hekateras.itch.io/CoolGame then, well... takes some of the fun out of it. That's why I was thinking that a custom URL could be a workaround. If they load a game and the page URL is just itch.io/CoolGame, it's a lot less obvious. (There's also the "View All by [Username]", "Follow [Username]" overlays, which isn't ideal either, but asking for that to change would be more ambitious. I'd be fine with just a custom game URL.)

> Especially the gift part. That sounds like a key to a paid game.

As I hope I made clear now, it is a gift because the entire game itself was created as a gift. I do not have plans to monetise the game at any point.

> You can always make a sockpuppet throwaway account to upload a project and be anonymous and change the name of the account later.

That is my fallback options but has many downsides - for one thing, changing the account name will invalidate existing game links, right? Specifically because the account name is in the game URL. This is extremely undesirable. So even if I upload games to a sockpuppet account for this, I would still want a project URL that's not tied to the account name.

I do not think a custom webpage URL that doesn't have the creator in the URL itself would be "an abuse of itch.io's facilities".

> Anyways, there are all sorts of problems. It would be much easier to organize the "secret santa" event on some other platform and have the projects on Itch regularly after the event.

It is organised on some other platform. But that other platform does not allow html5 hosting, which is where itch comes in. I don't know where you got the impression that I was asking for all this to happen on itch; I was only providing context on why I wanted a game URL without the creator name in the first place. (Clearly unnecessary and counterproductive.)

I am perfectly aware of what itch is used for, thank you. I am not asking for a file exchange from one person to one person. The game should be publicly viewable. I want the game I publish this way to be public to everyone.

> Oh, and if this is about urls only and not about files and keys and such, just use an url shortener. At the latest when viewing the page, the gifted person would know who made the game.

I don't think you read my post.

I would like a way to link to the game page without including the username of the person who uploaded the game.

Reason: I would like to upload a game as part of a Secret Santa-type gift exchange event which has a limited anonymous period during which creators of gifts are supposed to be mysterious. I think a custom URL with no creator username would be the simplest way to accomplish that.

The ideal scenario would be a link to a page that cannot be publicly connected to the account, but a custom URL without the username would also be sufficient - the identity of the creator doesn't have to be impossible to find, it just shouldn't be as obvious as being in the game URL. For the same reason, I would also like a way to toggle whether the game creator is displayed as a contributor in the browser tab title.

Yeah, there's definitely a time and place for deliberately letting yourself be caught by the chicken's vision or by the hound or farmer's peripheral vision to cunningly manipulate them. I really enjoyed that too ^^

Fantastic little InvInc-like. I enjoyed engaging the farmer, hound, and the most harmless yet fearsome enemy of all, CHICKEN, in a heart-pounding game of cat and mouse.

Addendum:

I'm reminded of Invisible Inc, which is a fantastic game and works in all the right ways... and has a god-awful tutorial that fails to teach you some of the most important mechanics, such as the distinction between noticed and seen enemy vision. I regularly watch new players hamstring themselves by playing on self-imposed hard mode, navigating enemies under the assumption that the "You get seen and *overwatched* here" vision cone is twice its actual size.

It speaks to the flaws in the tutorial, which not only fails to explain the difference, but doesn't even let you move through peripheral/noticed vision, let alone force you to do so to teach you that it's basically safe. I wish the devs had improved the tutorial, but I am very very glad they didn't decide to instead cut the peripheral/seen distinction just because it was confusing to some players. *Shudder*

>I’m curious for feedback here from other designers. My instinct at this moment is to cut diagonal movement.

You're never going to make a game that instinctively "clicks" with 100% of players. I recommend resisting the impulse to fix what isn't broken to reach a broader audience. Besides, you spelled out a much better solution already: Simply rework the tutorial so that moving diagonally is unavoidable and have players repeat it once or twice so it sinks in.

I don't think so, most likely it was a room accessible only via diagonal corner tiles that I missed.

Which, I'm torn about. My biggest issue with them is that it's often very hard to see if there's a corner entrance or not until you're looking at it squarely. So scouting them is a bit of a timesink.

Simple but pretty fun concept! Well done, would love to see a more polished postjam version of this with some SFX

Fantastic write-up. I was wondering about the map-gen - it was sufficiently challenging to explore and navigate without generating completely frustrating dead ends (such as ending up in one "prong" of the map only to find that the exit is on the other prong). Very interesting

Question: I can't speak to this with certainty, but I could have sworn that twice so far I've had maps (both cases it was the first level - chronologically, I mean, not LVL-1) where one of the data nodes was in an enclosed space only reachable via Burrow. One was a particularly memorable occasion because I tunneled into the room with the node and a patrol in it, had the Hunter follow me in, and then circled back around to the entrance I had made to get back out. I don't think I could have possibly missed an existing door if there had been one. Do you know anything about that?

Excellent game with fun mechanics and a great difficulty curve

Thank you for playing :)

Personally, I can say that luring guards out into the hedges works almost as well as with gardeners. They will aggro after a bit, but breaking line of sight seems to reset the timer, so you can pretty easily get away with it. The only downside of their disguise is you don't get the shovel. (And you can't interact with poisonous plants without raising suspicion, but it's usually not hard to do that without being seen, so it's not a major constraint).

It looks awesome and proves less is more sometimes

What a cute game. Thank you for making this.

Nice concept but controls are little too frustrating for something this time-sensitive, I think