   Recommended Download size for indie games?
  I'm not sure this is the right forum for this, but...  I was wondering what the recommended download size of indie games should be.  For instance, when I download a game from the internet, I rarely will download the game if it is over 100mbs, unless of course, it's a game I've been following for a long time or have heard about beforehand.What do you as developers think.  What is the download size you aim for.Would I be correct in saying that: the smaller the download size, the more people who will try it.   
  Personally, I try to stay in the 50-75 MB range. Most casual game portals prefer game downloads to be 100 MB or less and as far as something like Steam goes, I doubt they have any restrictions.Aztaka (an indie game) was a whopping 1 GB. As for the will more people try it question: It depends. If it's over 100 MB you might be losing some potential players (really depends on your target market), but the more important aspects are the screenshots/videos/etc. that make some one want to download the game in the first place.   ;  Thanks for the feedback.  The reason I ask is because the size of my art assets are starting to add up quickly.  No worries, though, as the game is still less then 50mbs.  This was good information to know.   ;  No problem :) If people are really interested in playing your game, I highly doubt anything under 100 MB would turn them off. You probably have even more leeway if your game is for more of a core audience (versus casual.) At the same time, I'd be pretty hesitant to download a game that was 100 MB and just a single level! (i.e. the bigger file size = more content the game should have.)Our last game (here) ended up being 72 MB. It has 24 (single screen) levels, a secondary gameplay mode, an unlockable gameplay mode, menus and such, and 12 full screen cutscenes. That was about as small as we could get it without sacrificing visual fidelity or reducing resolution size :)   ;  Well, there's a big difference between "indie" and "casual."  The casual market I'd say you should definitely keep it down to something that can be downloaded in 5-10 minutes or so on a modest DSL connection.  The reason I say this is that the OP specifies indie, but not casual.  Especially with something like a niche market game, maybe a hex-based war game, it's not even going to matter what size the download is; people into it WILL download it regardless if it looks good.   ;Quote:Original post by ShinkageWell, there's a big difference between "indie" and "casual."Not so sure. Our studio is indie (no corporate overlords, 2 guys full time + contractors) and we make some casual stuff :)But yeah, niche market stuff like hex is going to be swallowed up by the dedicated regardless of size! I guess I wasn't clear in my follow up post regarding that, but you are definitely correct.   ;  It depends what kind of game you're trying to make. The important thing is not to do obviously wasteful things.   ;  What I meant by that is that indie doesn't imply casual, and casual doesn't imply indie.  Indie generally means your company doesn't have the backing of a major publisher, and casual generally describes a certain kind of game.   ;  as long as its <10mb then its OKremember demo's of fullblown commercial games from a decade ago were about that size   ;  Just remember that appropriate compression can do wonderful, amazing things.Granted that the visual quality was to a lower standard than even casual modern PC games, but remember that they somehow managed to squeeze Resident Evil 2, FMV and all, onto a 32 Megabyte cartridge for the Nintendo 64 release -- while the PS1 version weighed in at, IIRC, about 270 megabytes where everything was uncompressed.For example, for images, PNG is lossless and supports transparancy, and ought to be able to get 4:1 compression without breaking a sweat -- for low-color images, I recall its compression ratio being on par with GIF, and on high-color images, not much worse than typical JPEG compression.For sound assets there's Ogg Vorbis (free, lossy, comparable to MP3) or FLAC (Lossless, gets around 2:1-3:1 compression)For video, there's Ogg Theora, which is comparable to h.264 I believe -- though you'll need some muscle to play it back.   