Jumping on the 2MB bandwagon in Off Topic

ID:78654
 
Aug 7 2009, 1:13 pm
Once again, I find myself grudgingly agreeing with parts of Silk's point, yet cringing at the way he has conveyed it...lol

I don't agree that BYOND games have no reason to ever grow larger than 2MB, but I do agree that if the size mainly comes from high-res title screens and other wasteful graphic resources (which generally only come packaged with games that don't even come close to living up to the look of those wrappings once you get inside the actual game) and lots of poorly chosen, uncompressed sound files, then yes, there's a problem...

But if a game genuinely uses some extra file space to accomplish something worthwhile (lots of compressed, yet good quality sounds, high-res graphics all-around, etc.), then I have no issue with it...

My largest game package is Murder Mansion, weighing in at 2.6 MB... This is obviously due to sounds... Virtually none of the sounds in Murder Mansion have been edited from the originals I found on the 'net (mostly through findsounds.com), and quite a few of them are far larger than they need to/should be, so if I ever got around to doing some optimization, I could probably shave that total down quite a bit...

DBTC tips the scales at 1.5 MB, making it perhaps one of the only fan games that slides in under Silk's arbitrary limit...
#1 Aug 7 2009, 1:58 pm
Sound files can be easily compressed into OGG format I found. It shaves quite a bit off the file size.
#2 Aug 7 2009, 3:46 pm
I use a variety of sound effects and music to convey a rich and natural atmosphere in my current project. While the sound effects take about 450kb, the music files are the main culprit of my game's size, taking 12mb. Every file is in .ogg format, and I've even tried packaging everything in a .zip file that is unpackaged during runtime, but this only helped lower the size by half a megabyte (I would appreciate some advice here!).

Given a choice between removing some files or otherwise compressing them in a quality-loss format, I would probably ask myself the question 'is the size of these files justified by their contribution to the game', followed by 'to which audience am I releasing this game?'. If the answer is positive to the former, which in my case I believe it is, I must ask myself if my potential audience would be willing to download sound files that take over 12mb, to play my game. I'd wager that this would prevent any 56k fellas from playing my game, and also those too impatient to wait 'til the download finishes, and want to just play the game already. Otherwise, if my game ends up impressive and fun enough, I don't believe people would be deterred.

So my response to this is, overall, similar to yours: if you can justify the game's size, then go with it. But if your shabby game only weighs so much due to mp3s, or aforementioned high-res graphics, you should probably consider toning it down.
#3 Aug 7 2009, 5:21 pm
Do what some non-BYOND game designers do and provide a secondary "high quality music" download that overrides whatever music the game comes with by default.
#4 Aug 8 2009, 5:54 pm
Efencea is 5 mb.