Hi all,
I’m just curious what typical size a 40-level scroller game would be like?
I have only about 6 levels done so far (along with several other common .LUA scenes and library files) and my build is already around 20MB!
Yes, I have cleaned my project folder of all unnecessary/unused files especially images because I read somewhere before that anything on the project folder will be included in the build, thereby bloating the build size.
Cheers,
Santi
Lua files themselves are just full of text, so if they are over 1 mb that’s going to be a pretty big file.
The graphics/audio assets are what is going to take up the bulk of your file size. There is no real average, because all apps and games are different. You can use pnggauntlet to compress your PNG files, and Audacity to decrease the bitrate of your audio files.
Also consider the audio format you are using - wav files are considerably larger than ogg (android) or caf (iOS) files. Depending on the audio you are using, you may not have a noticeable drop in quality if you convert to these file types.
I use PNG-8 for all my graphics, saved from Photoshop CS6. So far the graphics is totalling to about 7.8MB. A portion of these images - those common assets, will be reused in future levels, but I’ll be adding more.
I have about 18 OGG sounds files compressed with Audacity, totalling to only 282KB.
BTW, I’m using Level Director to create my level maps… could that be contributing a lot to the size? LD creates its own LUA files for every level, averaging to about 95KB each in my project.
My typical game sizes are around 10 … 20 MB.
For clients I have made games much larger.
With today’s high speed download and large storage, this is less of a problem than before.
Here are a couple of tips that I use…
If an image doesn’t need transparency, use JPEG for the file format. A 500kbyte PNG might end up being 50kbytes as a JPEG. JPEG doesn’t support transparency which limits its use for many images, but backgrounds which likely don’t have transparency are the biggest images in your app and the ones that can benefit the most from the better JPEG compression.
Audio: Many of us want the best quality audio we can have, but that comes at a price. A 44khz stereo track will be considerably larger than a 11khz mono track. Many phones only have one speaker, and when they have two, they are so close together, stereo doesn’t accomplish much. With small speakers, 44khz and 11khz isn’t a whole lot of difference. Of course using headphones changes this equation a bit but pick and choose. Beeps, clicks and buzzes don’t need a lot of quality, but they are generally small any way. And on the large side your music is likely going to be where you want the most quality, but they are largest of files and the ones that benefit the most by resampling and dropping to mono.
Thanks for the feedbakcs guys,
@Rob,
You got it spot on on item 1. I forgot to mention I did just that - no transparencies = JPEG.
Great tip on the Audio part. I guess because I’m a sound lover and I usually use earphones/headphones when I play, I couldn’t resist the sound of stereo and good quality :D But I you are absolutely right, most phones can’t really produce much difference between 44khz and 11khz. So much so with stereo vs mono. I’ll try to trim down on these as I go along and see how much build size I can shred off .
Thanks a lot.
Lua files themselves are just full of text, so if they are over 1 mb that’s going to be a pretty big file.
The graphics/audio assets are what is going to take up the bulk of your file size. There is no real average, because all apps and games are different. You can use pnggauntlet to compress your PNG files, and Audacity to decrease the bitrate of your audio files.
Also consider the audio format you are using - wav files are considerably larger than ogg (android) or caf (iOS) files. Depending on the audio you are using, you may not have a noticeable drop in quality if you convert to these file types.
I use PNG-8 for all my graphics, saved from Photoshop CS6. So far the graphics is totalling to about 7.8MB. A portion of these images - those common assets, will be reused in future levels, but I’ll be adding more.
I have about 18 OGG sounds files compressed with Audacity, totalling to only 282KB.
BTW, I’m using Level Director to create my level maps… could that be contributing a lot to the size? LD creates its own LUA files for every level, averaging to about 95KB each in my project.
My typical game sizes are around 10 … 20 MB.
For clients I have made games much larger.
With today’s high speed download and large storage, this is less of a problem than before.
Here are a couple of tips that I use…
If an image doesn’t need transparency, use JPEG for the file format. A 500kbyte PNG might end up being 50kbytes as a JPEG. JPEG doesn’t support transparency which limits its use for many images, but backgrounds which likely don’t have transparency are the biggest images in your app and the ones that can benefit the most from the better JPEG compression.
Audio: Many of us want the best quality audio we can have, but that comes at a price. A 44khz stereo track will be considerably larger than a 11khz mono track. Many phones only have one speaker, and when they have two, they are so close together, stereo doesn’t accomplish much. With small speakers, 44khz and 11khz isn’t a whole lot of difference. Of course using headphones changes this equation a bit but pick and choose. Beeps, clicks and buzzes don’t need a lot of quality, but they are generally small any way. And on the large side your music is likely going to be where you want the most quality, but they are largest of files and the ones that benefit the most by resampling and dropping to mono.
Thanks for the feedbakcs guys,
@Rob,
You got it spot on on item 1. I forgot to mention I did just that - no transparencies = JPEG.
Great tip on the Audio part. I guess because I’m a sound lover and I usually use earphones/headphones when I play, I couldn’t resist the sound of stereo and good quality :D But I you are absolutely right, most phones can’t really produce much difference between 44khz and 11khz. So much so with stereo vs mono. I’ll try to trim down on these as I go along and see how much build size I can shred off .
Thanks a lot.