Create simple video games with Itch.io

New platforms are making it easier than ever to design and publish indie games.

Hi! I’m journalist Caroline Delbert and this is The Toolkit from Robotics & Beyond 501(c)3. Our goal every week is to give you some videos, projects, and products that help kids (and parents) get inspired by science, technology, engineering, math, and creative design. 

This week in issue 13 we’re going to talk about itch.io and making narrative games. Itch.io is a public platform for all kinds of games, but independent creators in particular love it. It’s free and easy to upload to itch.io, and many people offer their small, experimental games on itch for free. Then we’ll talk about Ink and Ren’Py, two ways to make narrative games that you can easily package and upload to itch.io if you want.

The Indie Game Boom

There’s been an enormous boom in indie games, amplified partly by major console programs like ID@Xbox (which is bringing 15 loved and lauded indies to the next Xbox) and Nintendo Switch’s port* of what seems like every beloved indie from the last five or more years. Marketplaces like Steam and the more recent Epic Games Store play a part, including by funding development of indie games.

And finally, there’s the platform we’re looking at today: itch.io, a massively democratic and open platform for sharing all kinds of games, including major ones as well as the tiniest microgames and even game assets. We’ll look at an example of a super minimal and fun game on itch.io and then a couple of ways you can make games that can be put on the site for others to play. (This is definitely an activity where parents should be involved before you upload anything anywhere.) I’ve picked two narrative game makers that will run on any computer and that don’t require especially powerful hardware. 

*A port is an adaptation from one platform to another, like PC to Switch or even Super Nintendo to Switch.

Ages 5-8: #hasicontent (microgame)

Itch.io hosts a ton of game jams, where people make wildly different games that fit a shared theme or restriction. A games artist named Lu_Bu made a game called #hasicontent using Pico-8, which is a virtual machine (more on those here!) you can use to make tiny pixel games that look like original Game Boy.

In #hasicontent, from a German term for “bunny,” there’s no winning or losing. You just use arrow keys to look for bunnies in a big grassy yard and then photograph them by pressing x. It’s cute, it’s very simple, and all the bunnies have different names you see when you photograph them. Lu_Bu was inspired by the real bunnies in his yard. He included #hasicontent in itch.io’s gigantic anti-racism fundraiser bundle, which raised more than $8 million dollars earlier this year.

Ages 8-12: inkle’s Ink language (software)

For kids who are ready to start tinkering with code, I love inkle studios’ open-source language called Ink, which you can write using a client called Inky. Download Inky here, then use inkle’s simple tutorial to start writing interactive stories. All of inkle’s own games, like Heaven’s Vault and 80 Days, run on the Ink language. It’s a neat combination of ideas and syntax from programming with ideas and syntax from creative writing. 

One of my favorite very short Ink games is a beautiful “meal simulator” called That Hole-in-the-Wall Place by Ink newcomer Christine Danse, which she made for inkle’s 2018 “inkjam.” And here’s a side-by-side comparison of the markup code versus the game text for one of my own projects.

Ages 12-15: Ren’Py (software)

People who’ve played a lot of Ren’Py games know immediately when they see one. It’s a powerful engine for making narrative games that look really polished. Here’s Ren’Py’s own great “quickstart guide,” honed over many versions in nearly 20 years of development. You can download the software there. Making a Ren’Py game involves putting in code that’s similar to Ink — it’s a combination of dialogue and story writing and some code to help move different story pieces around.

My favorite Ren’Py game is called Long Live the Queen. This game is tough—part of the fun of it is in having to try over and over to get it right, and every time will be different. You play Elodie, a young princess in a magical kingdom who’s trying to learn how to survive until she is crowned queen. It’s a very intricate and well made example of what Ren’Py can do.

Here’s a Ren’Py sample code snippet from their quickstart:

(Last week’s newsletter was: Don’t be afraid to look up the answers)

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Wow that’s cool!

One of my favorite people on YouTube, Professor Shoelace, teaches you how to lace a pair of sneakers into a checkerboard effect. (Someone, not me though, still has some checkerboard rainbow laces from Hot Topic in 2001. Couldn’t be me.)