It's crucial to keep it from getting any bigger, because people will download the smaller competitors first. And only if they are unhappy will they finally download mine. Most C-based games of this type are less than 1 MB stuffed.
Many shareware games are bigger than 1 MB stuffed nowadays, though, especially if it's something that's costing a decent amount of money.
I did a bit of research not long ago at various download sites. Comparing my download rates with some of the competition. Even though my game had better screenshots, a better description, equal or better options, and an equal rating, it got less downloads. The only explanation was size.
That's ignoring play, word of mouth, advertising, etc. A company like Freeverse will have a lot more pull from the get-go because people know them and are at their website for other reasons/games already. With a smaller number of games offered (and a smaller advertising budget), the playing field is not quite level.
I tried my darndest to get the whole kaboodle to be less than 1 MB stuffed, but even with compressing all the graphics and whittling away at various things, it's 3.5 MB stuffed.
It's really impossible to get it smaller than 1MB. My KTA Tennis app zipped with Mac OS X 10.4 only shrinks to 1.1MB ... and that's not including most of the artwork / sound assets.
I had hoped for a solution that didn't involve thousands of additional objects :-(
I would like to know if this speeds up game execution a lot, so let us know if you try to implement it.
Also, can animated gifs be used as icons on buttons, or just static images?
Cheers, Karl _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
