I recently launched my game on gamejolt, and added it to liluo as well. When I view the analytics, I notice I get a decent number of views per day, but almost no downloads.
So my question is, do you find more people play your game if it’s a “web” game instead of a download game? I am wondering if my choice to make the game “download” instead of stream is hurting my chance for more people to play. (The reason I never made it a web game, is because I ran into several complications when ported to the web, such as enemy timings being off, and the music not starting until almost a minute into a level.)
I don’t have any of my own analytics to compare and I don’t even browse game sites much. But when I do, I don’t even consider download only games. And when people here showcase their GDevelop games I try to (eventually) play it and give comments. But if it’s download only then nup, I don’t bother.
Do you think your game is a casual play type? If so, then it will probably find the right audience with online play.
I believe there’s a setting or something where you can pre-load your music. And of course make it as small as possible with compression. What size is your music file?
I figured that might be the case. I might work on trying to reduce the file size of the game even more if I can. Currently I have 10 music files, each about 40mb right now. If I can preload them though, I might see how I can do that. The game in total right now is 3.38gb, which always felt big for what it is, despite deleting everything that didn’t end up getting used.
Oh wow, your game is huge. The music files can be much smaller. I had a looping music file in a game which I downloaded from free sounds. It was 1 min 46sec and 7.8mb. I used an online compressor which made it 368kb. It sounds fine to me.
If your images are also very big it would be another way to reduce size.
One option for you is to extract part of your game to make it into an online playable intro demo that loads fast and gives the player an idea if they’re interested.
It has quite a decent amount of content for it, but even for what it is, it does seem a little big. I will try compressing the songs! The visual assets are all png (which is larger anyway), but all pretty low resolution. I think I’m going to try your idea of a demo though! I hope it encourages people to give the full game a try. Thanks for all of the advice!
That’s massive, that’s the realm of AAA console game sizes! What makes up the size? From what you’ve said, the music is maybe 500Mb at best. That leaves about 2.8Gb for graphics, 'cos you’d be lucky if scripts and scenes can push past a few Mbs.
I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly is taking up so much space. So far I’ve found 200mb in video, then around 300mb in sprite/background assets. So my 3.28gb was apparently my dirty file size, but when the game is built and has it’s own file, it’s 2.8gb, and it’s 1.8gb compressed.
Edit: Ok, so from the built file, the “app” folder is 938mb, that’s the one that has all of my assets when I open it.
but then under dist, my set up application is 512mb
then under dist>win-unpacked>resources, there’s another file “app.asar” that is 960mb
If building the game for desktop, you do not distribute the entire app folder. You either distribute the exe in the dist folser (named installer) or you distibute the win-unpacked folder, which is a portable (installee free) version of the game.