As I’ve been developing Caverns of Underkeep I’ve been keeping an eye on the size of my game. So far I’m coming in at under 440KB - Originally I didn’t want to exceed 1MB but I’m not sure if thats going to happen. I’d still like people on slow connections to be able to play the game - And for every 1KB saved, that means I pay less in bandwidth fees.

Ways I have kept the game small:

No Music - So this doesn’t work for all game styles but for mine I’m pretty confident I can get away without having any music. The alternative is to use .mid files (which sound horrible) or compressed digital audio (which sounds good, but takes up lots of room) or to use tracker files (.mod or similiar) which are like midi, but they use samples for the instruments. Tracker files can find a nice balance between size and sound quality if your musician is skilled enough you can get about 1/3 the size of a traditional .mp3 of the same length.

PNG compression - I use pngs for almost everything, but I check if .jpg produces better results without losing quality. When the UI gets redone by a much better artist than me it’ll most likely be .jpg that compresses better for images with many colours - for low colour images (such as my monsters) .gif or .png work a treat. I like png because it has a built in alpha channel - which (if you’ve ever had to do sprites with masks before) you’d know saves a ton of time.

In order to optimize my .png files so they are the smallest I can possibly get I use a tool called optiPNG which runs my images through several different optimisers to pack them into as little space as possible. Remember, the less colours you use the better you can compress image, try to use less than 255 colours per image. That way you can save your images as 8bit pngs. The gimp has a useful tool for reducing an images colours, whilst reducing graphical artifacts.

SFX, 22khz or 11 khz mono, again not for every game, but for mine SFX just have to be there, they don’t have to sound amazing I haven’t programmed the SFX stuff yet, so I haven’t decided on the exact compression I’ll be using - but you can be rest assured that it ain’t going to be 44khz stereo.

Proceduraly generated content - Well, randomly generated dungeons anyway. Algorithmically generated stuff takes alot less disk space than traditional data driven games, if you’re thinking about making a webgame maybe you should think about ways in which you can offer good gameplay and variety through procedural generation.

If anyone has any other ideas on how to save on space, I’d be glad to receive any suggestions.