leafo

If you're curious, I run the indie game store http://itch.io and I recently released a numbers break down this past month: http://itch.io/blog/2/running-an-indie-game-store-2015

I'm also on quest to become an artist, I created a site for keeping up consistent drawing streak (although I'm struggling at the moment).

The site is for anyone to use and we have quite a few artists using it already: https://streak.club/s/8/daily-art-2015

Here's a post I wrote talking a little more about the site: http://leafo.net/posts/introducing_streakclub.html

Hello,

I created itch.io about two years ago. I originally launched it on HN too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029

Would be glad to answer any questions.

Naturally the tech stack of itch.io is very cool:

It's powered by MoonScript http://moonscript.org/ , the transpiled language I wrote. Using Lapis http://leafo.net/lapis/ , the web framework I built. It's running on top of a custom Ngingx build called OpenResty http://openresty.org/ (I didn't make that)

Because Lua is not something you typically see running websites there a lot libraries that I had to write to facilitate the basics: talking to APIs, uploading files, storage management, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Mailgun, etc, etc. Check out my GitHub, I opensource most of it: http://github.com/leafo

Thanks for submitting. I make this site. Feel free to ask any questions. Been running it about two years now. Originally launched it on HN as well

Sure, I'm in the process of reworking the game browsing pages and having a weekly (and maybe daily) list of top sellers/top downloaded is something I'm considering.

Nice seeing itch.io here. I make itch.io, check it out if you're into indie games: http://itch.io

I wrote a service in Go to transparently transcode gif to video that you might be interested in: https://github.com/leafo/gifserver

Indeed :) It's got great performance, glad I chose Lapis to build it. Handling millions of requests and tens of of thousands of payments on a 10 dollar VPS.

It's not something I've experimented with yet. Lua comes with a very low level debugger: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#pdf-debug.debug but I haven't tried using it inside of an nginx worker. Because the workers are forked you don't have immediate access to their standard in.

For lapis I did build a server side console for running code in the same environment as the worker though, it might be useful: http://leafo.net/lapis/reference.html#lapis-console

This project looks interesting, maybe it can be used: http://keplerproject.org/remdebug/

I was just experimenting this today, select queries will be able to deserialize array results into lua tables automatically. Same for json values as well.

Hello, I create lapis.

I'm actually on the verge of releasing a new huge update. New features include:

* first class lua support

* built in support for a lua templating language: https://github.com/leafo/etlua

* a new postgres driver written in pure lua, should play nicer with luajit and and be available in more stages of nginx request cycle: https://github.com/leafo/pgmoon

* lots of other smaller changes

All of this code is in master I just need to write all the documentation for it, sigh.

The biggest site I've created with lapis is itch.io: http://itch.io it's currently 43,209 lines of code (excluding libraries).

I run it on a really crappy 10 dollar a month vps, memory and cpu usage is tiny. I've handled well over a million requests per day in the past with no issues. The app communicates with a lot of third party payment services over http in the server, because of the non-blocking nature of openresty throughput is not affected when these services are slow (eg. paypal).

Another interesting lapis project is MoonRocks: http://rocks.moonscript.org/ it's a public lua module hosting site. It's opensource so you can check out what a developed lapis application looks like: https://github.com/leafo/moonrocks-site

Thanks for checking out lapis!

Kinda surprised seeing this here. I made this project 2 years ago and haven't updated it since. It was an interesting proof of concept, but I only took it far enough to run a couple of my games. The only takeaway was that I was really disappointed with the performance of native client OpenGL.

The modern version of Love supports OpenGL ES though so a rewrite like this isn't required, a better approach would just be to try to compile Love.

If you want to see more cool stuff I've done with Lua:

Moonscript: http://moonscript.org

Lapis: http://leafo.net/lapis

Sorry, the page was cached for 10 minutes and it wasn't cleared after deploying fix.

Awesome, my site, http://itch.io, is hosting the jam. Tell me if you have any questions.

MoonScript introduces a special construct for handling this exact situation: http://moonscript.org/reference/#the_using_clause_controllin...

If you're a game developer (or just want to make a game) then we're hosting a game jam in protest of their "candy" trademark. Make a game about candy. Check it out: http://thecandyjam.com

If you're looking to sell your first (or any) game, I make itch.io [1] and I'd love to help you out. It's a open marketplace for hosting indie games. I'm continually adding new stuff to make it super easy to help developers start selling with no hassle. The response from the community has been incredible and I'm always looking to add new games. Feel free to email me, leafot @ gmail if you have any questions.

[1]: http://itch.io

The linux button is not visible on the top if your resolution is too narrow, It's the least clicked button so I chop it off first. As for whether this is a good idea probably not.

I support PayPal, Amazon Payments and Stripe. The original blog post it a bit outdated as it's form when I originally launched.

There's actually no fee now. And I'll be changing the pricing model in the future to something much more flexible and friendly.

I've deliberated on this a bit. I don't think I'm trying to build a traditional storefront. If a developer is building a homepage for their game they aren't going to stick reviews and sales data on the page unless they are exceptional. So at that point they are just handpicking whatever data that happens to market the game well.

I want itch.io to be the place where people make the homepages for their games. Not another storefront page filled with links elsewhere. For that reason I purposefully don't force anything on the game pages.

Discovery of games is a separate issue. Up until now 99% of game discovery comes from external source (mainly twitter). The itch.io homepage and browse pages are potentially good places to discover games but the library isn't good enough where people see it as a place to go to find games (yet). If I do start aggregating reviews then you might see it on those pages, but never on the game pages.

I really don't have an answer. I just need to convince some of the more well known developers to upload their games. I need to try hard sell them on uploading, tell them it costs nothing and will take very little time.

More well known developers are uploading their games over time though, I think more people are starting to discover the utility of the site. Recently got two games from Vlambeer:

http://vlambeer.itch.io/gun-godz http://vlambeer.itch.io/wasteland-kings

So I guess the real answer is time. I need to prove the platform isn't going anywhere and that it has the features that are truly indie friendly.

Right now all purchases are associated with an email address, you can request a list of your purchases to be emailed to you from this page: http://itch.io/about/support

I'm very close to deploying a feature for registered users to view their purchases. I'm doing a revamp of user profiles and that's part of it.

Early access games are interesting, I think it's a realistic alternative to kickstarter. I don't have any rules regarding them, still thinking about it, but I very much encourage them.

They get a private download url that can be used to download the latest version of the game whenever they want.

I created itch.io, I posted it on hacker news back in march.

You can find the homepage here: http://itch.io

Here's the traffic I've received (the initial spike is hacker news launch): http://leafo.net/shotsnb/2013-12-25_11-16-16.png

A few milestones, I've paid out 12k so far to developers. I use pay what you want pricing, the average purchase is 1.79 above the minimum price of the game. 35% of all the money paid to developers on itch.io is "extra" money paid above the minimum price of the game.

Since launch I've primarily focused on adding features, hoping for organic growth to come along. (hence the huge flat line for months in the graph above) I've been starting to network more, mostly over twitter, which is really helping to bring the traffic up.

I'm very open about the process, feel free to ask me anything.

If you want to follow my development adventures you can follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/moonscript

To enable concurrency you'll have to spawn multiple workers using the worker_processes directive http://wiki.nginx.org/CoreModule#worker_processes

Excellent timing, just released a new version of MoonScript today, here it is in release form: https://github.com/leafo/moonscript/releases/v0.2.4

It's a comp submission: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview...

In the final graphic he says it took him only 8 hours though.

Awesome!

I really don't see why \ has anything do with escaping when not in the context of a string (or regex) literal. There is no ambiguity whatsoever. It's a shame more languages don't use it because it's easy to type (no shift required).