Reducing Game Size

[joelphilippage]

Hey. I hope this is the right board to post this question on. I am working on my new game Raven and the size is increasing rapidly. I have only finished the first half of the first chapter and already the game is 57 megabytes. I am guessing the main problem is that I am using 32 bit colors. I was thinking about using 256 color's but my game involves lot's of alpha blending with sprites. Could I just have the background's in 256 color's and reduce the game size or does the whole game have to be 256?

[Ashen]

You can't use >256 colour sprites on 256 backgrounds, so either the whole game would have to be 256, or you could reduce the colours of the background and then resave at a higher colour depth - which I think saves a little space, at least. There are already a whole bunch of threads on reducing the file size, search them out for other suggestions - and if 57 Mb is the uncompressed size, you'll probably find just zipping/rarring the game will greatly reduce it anyway (and there's a thread somewhere that deals with what programs give the best compression, to squeeze of a few more Mbs).

[nick.keane]

Also, make sure that the size you're checking is the sum of the 'Compiled' folder, because that folder is all that's required to run the game (not edit it, though). If the size you mentioned refers to the entire game directory, and you want to shrink that, try exporting all of your images as .png files.

And like Ashen said, zip it. My latest game TGCC is normally around 10 MB, but the zip file cuts it down to 3.2 MB - less than half the size of the original 'Compiled' folder alone!