How important is build size to you?
How important is build size to you?
I noticed something: about one third of the people who visit my page download the game. Why is that? The obvious answer is that this is normal, or the page presentation isn’t engaging enough, but almost all traffic comes from Ludum Dare. So that likely isn’t the reason, and the next assumption is that the build size is the issue.
Unreal Engine problem
I work in Unreal Engine, and it has this thing where builds can’t really be small. Even an empty project weighs around 300 MB. When trying to reduce the build size, you have to use some tricks (besides standard settings like built-in compression and packaging only necessary maps without engine content).
For example, compressing textures. Their size can be reduced almost without noticeable quality loss. Since lighting is volumetric, most of the visual appearance is created not by the texture itself but by its normal map, so you can reduce the size of all textures except normals up to a certain point without losing quality. But even that has a limit you don’t really want to cross.
There’s also a thing with audio: for example, the size of an audio file inside the engine increases almost 4 times (because the engine converts it into a special format so it can process it faster at runtime).
The trade-off
I can reduce the build further - smaller textures, simpler audio, more aggressive compression. But will that start hurting immersion for you? Especially considering I won’t be able to get the archive size below 400 MB anyway (compared to the current 600 MB).
So the question is - is it even worth it? How important is build size to you? How much does environment quality breaking down affect your immersion?
And also, I’m curious: what is your view-to-download ratio?
