Introducing itch.io

Today I'm launching a new website calleditch.io. It’s a marketplace forhosting indie games with a ‘pay what you want’ pricing model. Anyone canquickly upload their game and then customize the game’s page. Check it out athttp://itch.io.

Why

I think a ‘pay what you want’ model is really powerful for independent games. Iknow there’s a lot of game developers out there who make their games to giveaway and never consider selling them. With a site likeitch.io it’spossible to upload such games with a minimum price of $0. Effectively creating anice landing page with fast downloads and screenshots. If there’s somebody outthere who really likes the game then there’s nothing stopping them fromsupporting through a purchase.

I've seen a few other indie game marketplace sites but I've been disappointedin them because there is just too much crap on the game pages. Big logos forthe marketplace instead of the game, distractions like comments and ratingsforced on the game pages, and just poor user experience. I tried to makesomething clean and focused. The page you create is just about your game.There’s noitch.io branding anywhere, no ads, just your game.

Then there are sites like Steam which are great distribution platforms butimpossible for anyone to just starting using right away.itch.io is freefor anyone to start using right away. You can go upload your game now!

It’s still early in development, and I've got a lot of ideas to expand it, butthe basic idea is fully functioning.

Here’s a screenshot of the game page editor for one of my Ludum Dare games:

Payments

Payments are handled by PayPal. It’s the only thing I've had the time toimplement at the moment, but I'd like to add a more payment methods. Right nowI have it set up to take 10% of all transactions as a fee for hosting. I'mhonestly not sure of this number.

I wouldn’t mind lowering it for people especially if you help me test the siteout! (Everything is also in USD at the moment, I'll add support for othercurrencies as I figure this stuff out)

Technology

The technology behinditch.io is pretty interesting to me because it’s theculmination of a lot of my projects over the past few years.

The web application is written inMoonScript, the programming languagethat I've developed that compiles to Lua.

Lua is not a language you typically see powering a web application, so therewas a lot of groundwork to lay. For that reason I developed theMoonScript/OpenResty powered web framework calledLapis. It’s prettypowerful and I really like it. Expect an official release soon. It also seemsto run pretty well:

My MoonScript/OpenResty app: Requests per second: 4768.42 [#/sec] (mean)#yesplease

— leaf corcoran (@moonscript)March 3, 2013

All files are stored on Google Cloud Storage (think Amazon S3 but by Google).I originally developed the Lua rockcloud_storage for my last project(MoonRocks), but it was enhanced a lot to facilitate doing large fileuploads from the browser, and serving signed URLs for expiring downloads.

itch.io is a very image driven website, I needed something flexible toresize images on the fly. ImageMagick is generally what people use, but Ididn’t see an Lua bindings. Therefore I wrotemagick, bindings toImageMagick using LuaJIT’s FFI. Using this I was able to create a very powerfulimage server right inside of the application.

I also had to write libraries for PayPal and Mailgun. I might extract those outif anyone is interested.

The entire application runs on a very cool project calledOpenResty. It’sa special build of Nginx with emphasis on Lua. It gives me a fast webserverwith asynchronous support for HTTP requests and my database (PostgreSQL).

It’s also worth noting that I've written all the code required to run thisentire stack on Heroku, which will host a basic application for free. Sothere’s no excuse not to try something like this out! SeeHeroku LuaBuildpack andheroku-openresty.

Hopefully you found this interesting, if you haven’t checked out the site youcan do so athttp://itch.io.