Marshmallow Bear /
Keeping Itch.io Up-to-Date

One of the major problems when it comes to any development is that you get hyper focused on a particular platform and sometimes forget about other platforms. We have fallen prey to this exact problem and spent a lot of time focused on either Android or Steam. Well, now that Android is out of the picture for now, it seems like we’re focusing all our time on Steam. However, the problem here is that we also have Retro Sketch on itch.io and it is not getting much love.

Automatic updates to itch.io

As it turns out, itch.io has a fantastic tool called Butler. You can imagine that this works similar to how the steam CMD works. It makes it incredibly easy to publish any updates automatically. So, we have added this tool as part of our build and published pipeline. That means anytime there is a new build for steam, there will also be a new build on itch.io without any delay. Now the only manual part of our process is having to copy and paste the update notes to both platforms.

The way that the tool works is very simple. You unzip the files to your automation machine, and then simply log in at least once. Once you have logged in, you’re free to call the push command to upload any new updates to a specific channel. Channels are just a fancy word for platform, from what I can tell. You then can read the error code supplied back from running the executable inside of your shell script, to know if the operation was successful.

Still working on things

With this new automation process in place, we are not complete with our itch.io work. We still have yet to go and set up the page so that it is a little bit nicer to look at. It also would be nice to add in development logs, possibly from what is added here on the website.

One of the main issues with any development is that many platforms assume that you’re making a very long 2 to 3 year project. The thing is, for us that we make a small project that only lasts a few months, possibly. So it is just tedious to have all of our separate development logs per project done on multiple platforms such as X, Steam and itch.io. And it’s much easier to do brief nonsense on X and then do development blogs and such on our website. That just leaves the list of features and fixes going out to steam an itch.