Both required way different things and it all seems to be working without issue. Even better their platform promotes a little bit of my game to their user base getting me getting plays from people outside of my bubble.
Itch.io itself allows you to upload up to a 1 GB game directly to their website. All you have to do is fill out some basic information such as game title, description, and things like it’s an HTLM game and whatnot.
From there the game gets a custom page the players can play from. Along with a place to post development logs as game updates. You can also customize that page somewhat with a theme such as a page background color, border, and even using google fonts for the text which is a nice touch.
While their website has a 1 GB limit they have another solution that is quicker for uploading things to them called Butler. It is a command-line-based program that uses a command prompt. You can upload up to a 30 GB (uncompressed) game to them in this method.
The first step I took was to make a new project from the Itch.io website that I kept as a draft. This allowed only me and anyone else that I grant access to edit or see the page.
This process took a while since my residential internet upload speeds suck. At least I did not have any connection issues with their server and evenly at 1-2 MB/s a sec it was uploaded.
After that, I just type in the command to check for status updates on the upload itself. What must have been only a 5 to 10 min window a fully working download link appeared on my games pages and I was done.
The cool part is my game page was still listed as a draft. I could however generate a private link to it to share around for those that I wanted to grant access. They also have much deeper distribution options if you wanted to issue download keys or set up a key group for up to 20k people.
It was then time to download it and make sure everything worked. I was rather pleased that the download speeds were around what I tend to get on Steam if not a bit better. Even those who have much better internet than me were getting 30 mb/s or better speeds. Which for something I’m not paying for is just amazing they are permitting that kind of speed.
Once everything was checked out it was time to make the page public. After that my game could be searching for and found by people looking to play something that was in beta.
I even made a blog post on their site and had different options to indicate to Itch.io how they should promote it for some extra views. Since this was just a little demo I just said it was a basic game update since I don’t know if there is a limited amount of times they will give it a bigger push on their site.
I have only scratched the surface on using Butler. There is an entire system for uploading patches and configuring things in different ways. One day I’ll be updating the project and testing those out as well. It will be interesting to see how the UE4 patching system and work out along with people downloading it.
I could even take things further and set up donations or different monetization options on Itch.io. This however requires a business PayPal account the last time I looked. I can’t set something up like that at this time. I’m also not quite happy with what PayPal is doing to many indie game developers.
Moving forward I can create development blogs under each of my games if I wish to. They can help generate more views and traffic to my game. They have a bit of a different format for posts than I use on PeakD. It’s not that much effort to make some slight changes to the formatting as I have done in my release post.
I’m quite impressed with how easy and painless all of this was for a distribution option. The documentation they have made things easy and if I need to expand things in the future they have many options and routes I can take things.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar.
