How to Make Your Itch.io Page Look Amazing
It's really not that complicated
Itch.io is a remarkable platform if you are an indie creator. Not only does it allow you to host and sell your games to people, but it also offers numerous options if you want to make your pages stand out.
In this small guide, I'm going to briefly talk about how to make a nice Itch.io page for your games using only the default options of the itch.io theme editor.
Create your Project
Before you can theme anything, you'll need to create a new project on Itch.
Assuming you are logged in, click on the 🔽 icon in the top-right corner of the screen and click on Dashboard.
On the left side, you will see a red button that says Create new project, click on it.
Enter the title of your project. Itch will automatically generate a slug based on your title, which will be used for the URL of your project. If you'd like, you can change it manually. I usually like the project URLs of my game to be-written-line-this (this is called kebab-case).
Enter a brief description for your game. Write something catchy for it might be one of the first thing people read when seeing your work. Not only that, but Itch will "index" this field so that it is used for when people use their search engine to look for games.
I won't go over all the project settings on itch as there are a lot, but be sure to select the Physical Games classification, define some tags for your project, fill out the rest of the information according to your preferences.
Here's an example for my upcoming Breathless game:
Title: Renegades
Short Description: Breathless Sci-Fi Tabletop Role-Playing Game in the Used Future
Theme Your Project
Now that's the fun part. We need to make our project strike the people's imagination. If design/layout isn't your strengths, that's totally OK. While it helps, there are still ways to make your page look astonishing with simple little tricks.
For this section, I highly suggest you create an account on Canva as it will be a great tool to generate pretty images for your game.
Cover
Your game needs a pretty cover that will be used for when it's listed on itch's store. Create a new project in Canva with custom dimensions (630px by 500px). Canva has tons of free templates, graphical assets, pictures, etc. Use them to your advantage. Find a nice background, picture, or template and start from there. Add your game's title and make it BIG. This image will be showed among countless others, so it needs to make a splash. Also, change the font of your title so that it aligns with the themes of your game. Oh and I'll repeat it just in case, MAKE YOUR TITLE BIG.
You can set your game's cover on the Edit screen of the game.
For Renegades, I found a nice logo in the Canva assets which I've placed below the title — which is very large! I then added a nice background that looks like a used sheet of paper and added some yellow bars which I've passed through a mask in Affinity Photo.
Banner
When you load the preview page of your game, Itch lets you add a banner on top of the page. This is a very simple way to add ✨ to your page. Create a new Canva project with custom dimensions (960px by 300px OR 960px by 400px). Go inside your Cover project that you've created before and copy things you think might match for a nice banner. I love my banners to include the game's title, some graphical assets and even the short tagline we've used for our game's short description.
You can upload your banner when you are in the preview page of your game by clicking on Edit Theme > Banner
For Renegades, I copied my title and logo and placed them one beside the other since it's more of a horizontal layout. I added my tagline below my log and readded my used yellow bars at the top.
Background
Itch also gives you the ability to set a background for your game. The tricky thing is to align the background with the content box where your game's text is going to be.
Hopefully, I've made a nice Canva template (2400px by 1500px) with guides already pre-configured for you to get started quickly. You can use it by clicking here.
The top section is where your banner will be rendered. The section in the middle is where your content is placed. You can add nice borders on both the sides of the background to make your page look nicer.
You can upload your background when you are in the preview page of your game by clicking on Edit Theme > Background. If the quality of your image is too big, it's possible that itch blocks the upload. If that's the case, either compress the image using a free online service or change the dimensions to make the image smaller in height or width.
For Renegades, I've used the same old paper background from my game cover in the background. I then reused my yellow/blue lines and placed them vertically on both sides of the page
Content
That's the last bit I want to cover. Now that you have a beautiful cover, background and banner, you've got the attention of your potential future player. Now you need to keep it.
To do so, here's a suggested template for writing your game's itch content.
Start with the pitch. What is it about? What's the theme? What's the story? Those are all things you can briefly cover. Don't go for too long, or you'll lose them.
Talk about what is the game. Why should I care about the game? What system does it use? Is it long or short?
Move to the features. What makes your game unique? What are some of the cool things about this game? How is it different from that other game? List them in bullet points, it makes things more approachable because people know it won't last for long.
Include quotes, if you can. Talk with your friends, mutuals on Twitter, people on Discord and ask them if they'd like to give you a quote for your game. You never get anything if you don't ask for it, and tons of people are willing to help you if you just ask them. Me included.
For Renegades, my pitch is the game's introductory text. I went on talking about the system. I then listed the features which I thought were cool like the game's classes, it's print at home format and quick rules description. I still haven't gotten quotes from people but if you want to give me any that would be amazing 😊
Closing Thoughts
There are tons of other things you can do to make your itch page look nice, but I hope this quick guide gave you enough guidance to help you get started and do further research for the future.
If you liked this article, let me know at @RPDeshaies on Twitter and consider giving my a coffee ☕!
Leaving you with the final product page I have for Renegades, which will be live next week on itch.io!
René-Pier (@RPDeshaies) | Twitter
Design games as Fari RPGs (Breathless, Charge, HOPES & DREAMS) | developer of the VTT @app_fari and hosts open SRDs @games_fari.