itch.io

Would it be useful to create a topic in the Questions and Support forum that we could post in to try to attract attention? It says that it's primarily for community members to help each other, but it has been a way I've managed to contact itch (or at least, attract the attention of one of the admins) in the past when they weren't responding elsewhere.

Just to clarify, do you have to select "Initiate New Payout" on the payouts page to see the actual figure? And does it just take you to a new page to confirm, or does it actually initialise the payout immediately? I've been waiting on itch support for a substantial amount of time with no response, and I don't want to lose 30% of my income for pressing the wrong button.

An update to this: I'm now working on Shadow of the Wolf for Massif, which (assuming no issues arise during playtesting) will also contain new backgrounds. I remembered your comment and I have put in a feature request for COMP/CON to handle this specific issue, as I agree it would be a great addition. If it gets implemented for first party content, I should then be able to come back and add it for Legionnaire as well!

Thank you so much! I hope you enjoy it - it's looking very exciting at the moment, and has been just as much a labour of love.

Thank you! 💜

Totally agree that finding or making a map is challenging! I might consider commissioning one if this proves popular, we'll see.

In the meantime for anyone looking for maps to use in VTTs, I absolutely recommend checking out the various map resources in the #resource-hub channel on Pilot NET (you might need to search or check the pins since there's a lot of information there). If you're already into Lancer, Solstice Rain and Dustgrave both come with maps you can repurpose. Alternatively, Ralf (who wrote Dustgrave and runs Interpoint) has a map generator available here:
https://interpoint-station.itch.io/lancer-ttrpg-superior-pixelart-expansion-1-ma...

I'm afraid I can't take credit for Stolen Crown, that's all Laurie! But if  you enjoyed Legionnaire and want to see more Lancer stuff from me you might be excited to know that I'm currently working with Massif to produce one of their forthcoming first party adventures!

Hi, I just wanted to reply to say thank you for engaging with me on this and for rolling out this feature. I can see this being super useful for everyone doing crowdfunding distribution. :)

Just so we're clear: I pinged itch *repeatedly* over three or four days on twitter and got no response before giving up. I memed about it to try to pump up visibility, getting quite a lot of likes/RTs, which should absolutely have showed up on the social media manager's notifications feed. I pinged you on Mastodon and got no response. I went onto Discord and asked for help and got no response. Now, to be fair these are social media channels so I didn't *expect* any response from them in the first place, but don't direct people to them when you're clearly not monitoring them.

Edit: I'm sorry if the frustration is evident in this post but I promise you I would not be posting this and engaging with you if it wasn't a genuine issue. I did read all the available stuff on the website and on several other forums when I was looking for more contextual info. I did submit a support ticket, and got in touch with your social media. All these things you're saying to do, I did, and it didn't help - if you believe they should and they aren't, this suggests there is an issue there you might need to address internally.

I think the thing you need to communicate most clearly is the expected time to review requests.

I've worked in webdev and 100% understand the need to keep spammers from abusing your system and the issues it can cause for your other operations if you don't properly vet folks using it. The actual process of approval was never an issue, the major problem is that you don't communicate how long this will take. For example, I am used to dealing with services with response times within a day or maybe a few at the outside. That being the case the notice you've added would very much have not solved the issue for me, which was rooted in being unaware that your approval process would take (what I consider to be) an extremely long time.

At the end of the day, though, even if you were to give a pessimistic estimate it can be incorporated into scheduling and project management.  Having something is better than nothing, because regardless of whether or not you can speed up your timetables for approval, you'll always have the issue of creator being forced to guess how much time those internal processes take.

Also, this is a side issue but worth pointing out: I actually did try to contact your support team and as far as I can tell doing so did not expedite my request. Do you have any kind of triage/priority system? The impression I got was that you handled support requests chronologically, so I'm a bit unclear how contacting support helps here.

To be clear this is does not actually address the problem.

"Getting things set up ahead of time" is not a thing that seems obvious or is flagged to creators before you need to start the process, and no indication is ever given on how long it might take once it's underway. In my case it was a week before the email was approved, which was not communicated at all beforehand.

Saying that it's somehow creators' fault for not submitting emails for approval ahead of time when you give zero indication of how long it will require, and don't actually act on support requests, is not in any way useful. It's not unreasonable for creators to expect to be able to actually use the feature you provided rather than be stuck in an indefinite queue with no visibility.

I'd like to chime in and say this is an issue I also had, and it's deeply frustrating as a creator to be at the whims of manual approval. It's even worse when you have hundreds of people waiting on you with no clue when you might get some resolution, so you can't even answer their questions. This is a major pain point and is a big thing that's potentially putting me off using itch for future projects.

That was something I checked when creating the LCP but it's not a supported feature in COMP/CON as far as I can tell. From what I've seen suggested triggers aren't on any of the core backgrounds and it's not a field that's documented on the github or included in the LCP editor.

That said, I'll check in with the COMP/CON devs and see if I'm missing a way to add that, or if there are plans to add support for it in the future.

EDIT: Looks like this is not a feature that's planned to be added any time soon, but if anyone desperately wants this to be a thing, COMP/CON does accept pull requests!

This is a third party release, so not an official Massif Press product.

Ideally, it would have been yesterday, but itch is currently sitting on my key distribution email (apparently it requires manual review). It's very frustrating, but there's not a lot I can do about it.

The full public release will come once I can verify that the backers have their keys and are able to successfully redeem them.

Soon!

We're still on schedule! We've just completed the development edit and are coming up to the end of the second art round. The major steps left are copyediting (which we've just begun) and layout (which has been ongoing for a while). Obviously I can't give a firm date for release, but we're getting closer!

I've not yet set up the project for preorder (I might look into that at some point when I have some spare time), but followers should get notified when it updates, including at release!

Thanks! Yeah this is actually a problem with itch.io rather than the game. Try playing it on my site (it's linked on the page) and it should work just fine.

Yeah, I'm definitely left with the impression that I've just not grokked something about the game, rather than it being a failing of the game itself. I'm very impressed with the game on a technical level and I'm going to try to play it a bunch more to see if I can crack the code :)

I really enjoyed this - I've played for a while and only gotten the first row so far, but I'm definitely going to come back to this when I have more time. Patience definitely required! The puzzle is fun and engaging and the pastel colours are cute (though could potentially benefit from a little higher contrast).

I enjoyed playing this (once I worked out what I was supposed to do!), the puzzles were interesting and the stylised graphics are a nice touch.

I made it out in 31 steps.

Out of interest, what's the logic behind the dimension shifting only being active at certain points? I assume it's so the player doesn't end up inside a wall or something. Are there just two dimensions that you're shifting between? I could definitely see a larger game here where there were multiple dimensions you had to shift in between to deal with puzzles/enemies/maze-like levels. :)

Very graphically impressive. Really interested in the tech behind the worldgen, and would love to read a writeup if you'd be willing to do one. The lighting was interesting and the headlights a nice touch. I even enjoyed exploring offroad! A really solid basis for a larger project in future, if you have the time to build a game around it. :)

I absolutely love the music, what's the source? Did you write it yourself?

Graphically this is also pretty amazing. I love the particle effects, and also the little design touches: the radial lines as guides, the flashing/audio cues when seeking - design-wise everything just hangs together really really well. One of my favourites of this jam.

About the only thing I could find to criticise it would be a slight floaty feeling to the controls - to my mind, just a touch less inertia would have made things feel really tight and responsive. But that's a very minor point in an otherwise excellent entry.

This is a nice take on the theme but I really struggled even on easy mode getting the rhythm right - it was hard to tell whether there was serious input lag or whether my brain was out of sync (this might also have been exacerbated by the speeding up over time). Idea for a post-jam version might be to add a calibration step to check everything is in sync.

I enjoyed the progressive difficulty but found it tricky to judge sometimes where the hitboxes/hurtboxes of my ship and the enemy lasers were. SFX were a nice inclusion and the neat little animation touches like particles were impressive. Well done!

I absolutely love the soundtrack! Some nice animation touches in there too, particularly the dying ghosts fading away. I found the random obstacle generation pretty challenging and it took me a while to get used to shooting accurately. Would really have liked for a way to restart within the game itself rather than having to refresh (or perhaps there is one and I didn't find it?).

Fun graphical style and interesting gameplay (a little frustrating, but the good, challenging kind of frustrating). Took me a while to get the hang of some of the game mechanics; it's hard to interpret what's going on with the mobs sometimes, but overall very very fun.

I liked the music particularly, and how the tempo was tied to the player's speed. The graphics are a technical wonder, too! I struggled a bit to get the hang of steering but it still played well. Very impressive :)

Nice and simple. :) The unpredictable movement made this quite challenging, though really the limiting factor is the grey dots starting to fall faster than you can react to.

It took me a while to understand it, but I enjoyed the score mechanic and it made the game really challenging. The SFX were a nice touch too.

If you're having trouble with a level, you can refresh to get a new set of colours at the same size grid :)

Fun concept and remarkably replayable. I love the shader work you've done and the claustrophobic effect of the darkness and the encroaching lava.

I really love the graphical style, but I've not been able to complete a single track. The game's just too hard for me.