The file-size sweet spot...

[delsydsoftware]

Right now, I'm trying very hard to get Brickout's installer under 10mb(it's right at 15mb, and the demo is closer to 13.5mb). So, in your opinion, what is the perfect size for a casual game? Have you had games that didn't do well until you reduced the file size?

I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get the full version down to 9mb, but I don't think I can squeeze much more than that out of the program without a drop in quality.

[Luc Van den Borre]

Right now, I'm trying very hard to get Brickout's installer under 10mb(it's right at 15mb, and the demo is closer to 13.5mb). So, in your opinion, what is the perfect size for a casual game? Have you had games that didn't do well until you reduced the file size?

Your demo took 40s to download at 410 KB/s, too long to my taste, since that means it may take several minutes for people on slower connections. I think < 5 MB is best for a game like this. I don't have any hard data to back this up, but several publishers have told me this.

I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get the full version down to 9mb, but I don't think I can squeeze much more than that out of the program without a drop in quality.

Admittedly I only partially played level 1 of your game, but there is no reason that I can see that your game should be over 2 MB in size. Let me guess, you are not using lossy compression for any of your assets are you? In fact, I wonder if you are using any file-type specific compression at all, since all I see is RAW image files and WAV sound files. And why is your level set default.bls so huge?
Anyway, this is more a question (or an answer) for the technical forum, but I ogged your 13.5 MB title2 music to a 1.3 MB file (at 80 kbps, I didn't hear a quality loss). In fact, you can probably get better sound quality than you have now at 1/10 the size by ogging the high quality wavs instead of using 11 kHz wavs.
Same for the graphics, use JPG and/or PNG instead of RAW.
There's open source and free utilities and libraries for all this stuff.
I would also cut down the main menu music. There is no reason for it to be over 2m 30s. Bring it down to a 20s loop or so. Do all that and I bet you can get your file size under 2 MB.

[soniCron]

@Luc Van den Borre: I agree with all of this, except the image compression. Unless he's going to use JPG, it may be more beneficial to use raw image data with LZMA compression on the installer. (NSIS supports this.) Of course, JPG is ideal.

[princec]

Any advice about keeping file size under 5mb must be taken with a pinch of salt... or even under 10mb, for that matter.

Cas

[Emmanuel]

Atlantis is 17 MB and doesn't support software rendering.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[princec]

There we go then. It's all about the game, not the technology.

Cas

[papillon]

Of course, with a title like 'Brickout' which isn't very inspiring and screams 'yet another boring breakout clone' some of us become much less likely to download 10+MB than we would for something that sounded more exciting. But then, other people would write it off if it were SMALL, because a huge breakout game might have more chance of doing something new and interesting....



(Hrm. I've just had an amazingly silly game idea. Must prototype!)

[Luc Van den Borre]

The player may not care about the underlying technolog, but given a limited time and budget a developer can make a better game if he makes the right technology choices. What those are, exactly, is another matter.

I think it is reasonable to suspect that the same game at 10 MB (and with software rendering, for that matter - not that I'm picking on Atlantis per se, great game and all that) will convert better than at 20 MB and without software rendering. I may be wrong, but the anecdotal evidence that I have confirms my gut feeling on this.

[delsydsoftware]

Admittedly I only partially played level 1 of your game, but there is no reason that I can see that your game should be over 2 MB in size. Let me guess, you are not using lossy compression for any of your assets are you? In fact, I wonder if you are using any file-type specific compression at all, since all I see is RAW image files and WAV sound files. And why is your level set default.bls so huge?

I actually just finished putting png support in yesterday, but it's not in the official build yet. It shaved about 1mb off of the install size, but it makes custom gui-skinning possible, which is a nice perk.

The level sets are large because the bls file format stores level information and brick textures. The general idea is that people using the in-game editor can generate level sets and pass them to friends, without their friends having the same textures available. Users can make their own bricks and add them to the game with very little effort. I tried to make the game as customizable as possible, at the expense of file size.

Believe it or not, these actually compress very well. I have thought about using zlib to compress the sets further, but I'm still investigating that possibility. My biggest problem right now audio. The game uses OpenAL, and I'm struggling with ogg support. It originally used Fmod, which is soooo much better, but I wasn't sure that the shareware license would cover us, since we have more than one employee and plan on making several other games in the future.

[DrWilloughby]

Completely speculative:
-Acceptable file sizes are rising all the time.
-If your game is played in a browser, people don't usually pay attention to file size, though it should be well <5Mb.
If this is a downloadable game, I suspect <15 is best but <20 is acceptable.

On the other hand, you may as well get it as low as you can go without dropping the noticable quality of the game.

For reference, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa is 17.5 Mb.

[Luc Van den Borre]

Believe it or not, these actually compress very well. I have thought about using zlib to compress the sets further, but I'm still investigating that possibility.

That wouldn't help much with the size of the installer, but would make it easier to pass the files around, I guess.

My biggest problem right now audio. The game uses OpenAL, and I'm struggling with ogg support. It originally used Fmod, which is soooo much better, but I wasn't sure that the shareware license would cover us, since we have more than one employee and plan on making several other games in the future.

If you get the oggvorbis-win32sdk-1.0 in this directory http://www.vorbis.com/files/1.0.1/windows/ , there is an example file in there called vorbisfile_example.c, which takes a vorbis bitstream and writes it out as raw PCM. You could use this to convert your OGGs to wavs that OpenAL can read, no?

[delsydsoftware]

That's exactly what I'm trying to do, but the ov_open function crashes whenever I try to use it. I'm using DevC++, and I've tried using both vorbisfile.lib and vorbisfile_static.lib. Vorbisfile.lib causes the crash, and vorbisfile_static.lib refuses to link.

[1EyedJack]

My biggest problem right now audio. The game uses OpenAL, and I'm struggling with ogg support. It originally used Fmod, which is soooo much better, but I wasn't sure that the shareware license would cover us, since we have more than one employee and plan on making several other games in the future.

Have you checked out these tutorials for using Ogg with OpenAl:

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/op...ls/lesson8.php
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/openal-ogg-file/

[delsydsoftware]

Luc Van den Borre sent me in the right direction, actually. All I needed was a version of the library specifically compiled for DevC++. It's working now.