About the build size and ways to optimize it

[Clownia]

I created a small test project with two maps, three characters (two human, one cat), three music titles, no battles ... now the web build had about 50mb and a MacOSX build had about 500 mb (excluding assets I didn't need!).

When I checked "don't include unused assets" my "fog" image for the fog plugin wasn't exported - but all the standard battle backgrounds I haven't even used (and had to delete manually). So I guess that option has no use at all.

I could reduce the web build to about 30mb with png compression (PNGoo does a nice job there). Which is still quite big for such a small "game" (2 minutes playtime or something).

Is that "normal"? How big are your finished games? Do you build for web at all? How do your optimize your build size?

And about the music: When I export for web, do I need both m4a and ogg or would one of them be enough? For windows I'd only need ogg, correct? And what about MacOSX? (I don't own a Mac).

 

[LTN Games]

Most if not all of the size of the game comes from images and audio. I created a small demo game that I use for making my plugins and it weighs in at 7mb. this is really stripped down to about 4 - 6 images and no audio, just 2 sound effects. While your game is small in terms of gameplay it still contains the assets and you can most likely build a longer game with the same size it is now. Adding things to the database like items, armors, weapons and even enemy troops does not add much size to the final build. Anyways most finished games depending on how much assets you use weight in at 500mb+ but I've also seen some games at 300mb, it really depends how flashy you want to make it.

As for ogg and m4a, ogg is required for desto (mac and windows) and web browser. M4a as far as I can tell is only used for android and mobile build.

If I was to ever find enough time to finish an RPG game I would most likely focus my optimizations on the coding side of things and would most likely change a lot of the code to better utilize the assets. Right now they use tilesheets that are quite small, I would most likely increase the width by quite a bit and fit 2 tilesets into one sheet. Same with all the characters, I'm sure we could fit 4 - 6 characters into one image file instead of multiple image files. All my sound effects I would merge into one file and use a plugin to read the audio markers on where to play a sound effect from. this decreases load times and improves general performance as well, my guess is the file size would decrease too, maybe not by much but enough I guess.
Unfortunately most RPG games are large, and most games that have a small build size are mini-games like bejeweled, cut the rope and other games like that.

 

[Clownia]

Thank you for your evaluation (kinda). :) I guess I have to go with the bigger size after I fell in love with that parallax mapping option. *cough*