itch.io

All bro wants is those elves 🙏

This looks so good! How did you make the sky - and what shaders have you used? Great work!

UPDATE I’ve now added planes. Currently, infected flights directly infect airports, making spread very fast and unrealistic. I plan to make it so infected passengers from a flight go to a random, nearby tile in the destination country first to infect, with a slight chance to infect the airport itself. This’ll slow down the spread and will enable a country to actually develop the disease a bit before passing it on. This all ties to the land movement mechanic, which I still have to do tho, sooo looking forward to that :). Next step is boats, then land. Thanks!

An example of the virus spreading through aircraft :) It got out of hand…

Not a SINGLE screenshot btw 💔

UPDATE : Added country divisions. There are now 72 selectable countries. Next steps are transport and the international spread of the player-controlled virus through roads, planes, and ships

Font used : m5x7 by Daniel Linssen

AI can’t create anything new because of how it’s trained… Yes you can get it to (poorly) mimic existing styles, but you can’t make new ones with it. AI art just looks … bad

My point still stands. A unique and consistent style is more important that simply loads and loads of high res sprites. It can come up with loads of variants of stuff that already exists. It cannot come up with completely new and unique styles. AI has it’s uses in game dev, but image generation isn’t it.

The thing abt AI art is that it’s insanely distinguishable. Like you can tell it was made by AI instantly, which throughs lots of people off. Also, because of the way it trains, it cannot come up with new and unique art styles, which are often the basis of many game’s success, rather than simply using really high res images.

A pixelart game where your goal is to infect the world by evolving and spreading through boats and planes.

Thanks for keeping up with this games progress, and good luck to your own projects! :)

Hi everyone,

From time to time I come across an asset pack where the designer had embedded a little HTML embed for the user - you know, just to see all the animations in action and the assets themselves - and it got me wondering on how effective really is this strategy? Some asset pack designers (including myself!) will strive to create the most inviting and attractive pages possible, and this is something I have tried to experiment in for about a year, so I can share what I’ve learnt with the community.

It struck me that surely this HTML embed demo strategy might actually both be quite easy and effective, and so I performed a small experiment to crudely gauge how good this strategy is - and I will discuss it in this post.

What actually is the strategy?

Just to clarify what I mean by a “HTML embed demo”, this simply means when you make an interactable showcase of your asset pack and embed it into your page for people to play around with and get a better feel of your asset pack. I did it through a mini godot project.

The experiment?

I made a simple asset pack - a pixelart gun pack - with a HTML demo and released it on the 6th of July, 22 days ago (as of the date this post was written on). It is important to note that this experiment has uncontrollable external factors, like bot downloads, repeat visitors, or web scrapers that may skew results, hopefully this “experiment” will still prove the effectiveness of HTML embed demos to you all.

The results?

For asset packs on my account, on average 21.11% of people visiting any of my asset packs download it. Narrowing that down to pages that I deem to have a similar page design to my experiment pack (to ensure the view-download ratio boost is really because of the HTML demo and not just style), 28.91% of people visiting the packs download it. On my experiment pack, data was unfortunately skewed by bots (as is common on new asset packs), but by comparing the number of people who played the HTML embed demo to the number of people who downloaded the pack (which I can be fairly sure isn’t as influenced by bots), I conclude that 69.23% of people who played the HTML demo ended up downloading the pack, a significant increase. As bot visits decrease and genuine traffic increase, data will become more reliable, and I will share updated findings. As riddled with “buts” and “unfortunately”s this data is, I hope that a significant trend can still be observed. My account has around a thousand total downloads, so I hope that the data here is somewhat accurate. If any of the many, many, much more experienced designers on itch.io are willing to share their experiences with these kind of strategies, we would love to know.

My Conclusion?

I think I can conclude that the introduction of a HTML demo to an asset pack will significantly boost it’s success. I think that for the time it took me to whip together a quick demo, the extra downloads were worth it. I think that the fact that some people who would’ve ordinarily skipped past my pack instead downloaded it or put it into a collection thanks to my demo made it worth it. I shall leave the data for you to judge and use if you want, and I will keep the community updated both with this experiment and any others I do in my quest to discover what makes pages look attractive. If you have any thoughts or if you are an experienced developer willing to share some of your wisdom, please let me know! Thanks for reading. If I’m waffling or spewing nonsense, please let me know.

Looks great!!

Excellent quality with very clear attention to detail - I really hope this becomes popular. Keep up the good work :)

Looks really good!

Simple and sweet!

Nice!

Destined for greatness

Unbelievably high quality asset pack just like everything else you’ve made :D I understand that you’re probably quite busy, but I was wondering how you became so good at pixelart? Again, I understand that there is better use of your time, so please don’t bother answering if you don’t want to - in any case, keep up the fantastic work!

This is really REALLY good. Cannot believe this is your first asset pack on itch - you’re gonna become famous pretty quick here! Keep up the good work :D

Looks so good my friend wanted it to be his wallpaper :D

When I have the need for 2d mountains in my games, this is the first place imma go

An absolute masterpiece like always :)

Very high quality just like your other pack - keep up the good work!

This looks really cool!

Fantastic looking asset pack! Crazy that it’s only your 6th one too - Keep up the good work :D

Este paquete de recursos es fantástico: el estilo artístico es muy limpio y coherente, la paleta de colores está bien elegida y los fondos encajan a la perfección con los elementos de las plataformas. ¡Sigue así! Estoy seguro de que te convertirás en un artista de píxel art famoso en un par de años :) Por cierto, el español no es mi lengua materna, así que he usado Google Translate; disculpa si se ha perdido algo de calidad.

EVERYTHING in this asset pack looks good. I have no idea how one can even reach this level in pixelart design, but everything in this is top quality. Keep up the good work!

This looks so good for a first project! I’ve never seen that kind of black then white outline, but it fits with the style really well!! Keep up the good work bro :D

Looks so good!! I love how well defined your art style is - keep up the good work :)

Fym no generative AI was used. This is literally ONLY AI. Which is strange because it seems like you’ve made some pretty cool games in the past while this just looks purely AI

This looks so good!! I’ll defo use this at some point - thanks for providing such a great shader for us to use!! Keep up the good work :D

This looks SO GOOD!!! Defo one of the best tilesets I’ve ever seen! Keep up the good work

This looks so adorable :D

Rlly fun game!

Ref took both games down

He used BuildWithStar, you can LITERALLY see it in the source code

😭😭😭 You’re a genius. Ig that settles it