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ShortPlay Developer Docs

Link games (itch.io submission)

If you'd rather not upload a hosted zip, you can submit an existing itch.io game as a link card: POST /v1/submissions with { "itchUrl": "https://you.itch.io/your-game" } (api/src/submissions-routes.ts:344-). Tapping a link card opens the game's ShortPlay page first; a second tap ("Play on itch.io") opens your itch page in an in-app browser — it's never inline play.

What happens when you submit

  1. The link is fetched and validated — ShortPlay does one public fetch of your itch page. An unreachable or 404 link is rejected immediately with a message to fix the URL and retry (api/src/submissions-routes.ts:382-389).
  2. Ownership is resolved — if you've linked your itch account and it matches the game's itch author, you're the verified owner of that submission. Ownership changes which gate is stricter (see below) and whether the game can publish instantly.
  3. The gates run (docs/111; api/src/itch-metadata.ts:558-):
    • Reject (400, you see the reason immediately) — a paid game, adult/NSFW content, a password-gated page, or something that clearly isn't a playable game. On the owner-verified door, a download-only build (no browser-playable HTML5 embed) or a restricted/private page is also a hard reject — there's no curator fallback on that door, so those have to be wrong before they ever reach it.
    • Flag — anything uncertain (price unknown, a content warning, download-only, a login wall, an unclassified page) routes to curator review instead of auto-publishing. A verified owner with a flagged submission still goes to the queue — a flag never auto-publishes, even for an owner (api/src/submissions-routes.ts:411-415).
    • Clean — passes every gate.
  4. Duplicates are caught — if the same itch game is already live on ShortPlay, or already has a pending submission, you're told rather than getting a second copy of the same game (api/src/submissions-routes.ts:417-).
  5. Publish path forks on ownership: a verified owner whose submission is clean publishes instantly. Everyone else's submission — and any flagged submission, owner or not — goes to the Curator review queue.

Honest about curator review

Most link submissions are not instant. Unless you've linked your itch account to the one that owns the game and the page passes every gate cleanly, your submission sits in the review queue until a curator plays it and decides: approve, bless, request changes (with a reason), or reject (with a reason) (api/src/submissions-routes.ts:652-657). There's no bypass for link submissions the way there is for a verified-owner clean pass — a human looks at everything else before it's public.

Pre-submit check

Before you formally submit, POST /v1/submissions/preview runs the same fetch + gate evaluation as a dry run — you get the same reject reason (or a duplicate notice) without creating a submission, so you can fix an itch page and re-check before committing (api/src/submissions-routes.ts:221-332).