Hello,
I was wondering if someone could help with compressing a game. The game has over 500 images, several music WAV files, SFX, and animations. It is coming in at 3G. All images have been saved at smallest size through adobe. How do you as developers expand your game but keep the size manageable?
Another consideration is... Is it your own game or something written by someone else?
If it's your own game... then the advice so far will see you on the right track for a future release.
If however it's someone else's game and you just want a smaller version of it (perhaps to create an android port of that game)... consider using
UnRen to unpack it (if it's already packed)... then use something like
Cruncher to vastly reduce the size of the images/videos/audio files. As with the other suggestion already mentioned, you'll be balancing image quality -vs- file size. Cruncher does have a disclaimer, which I will repeat here... it overwrites the original files... So make sure to run it against a copy of the game, not the game itself. I can't speak to the quality of the resulting images, since I've never personally used it.
(For the most part, RenPy doesn't care what the file extension is. If you have a .PNG file that is actually a .JPEG... RenPy will display it anyway. Tools like Cruncher will recode the images to another format, but leave the name alone so nothing within the game breaks. Which is why tools like Cruncher can work without issue).
There are other tools which will mass convert one image format to another format... or convert one image format to a lower quality version. I've only done something like this once before and found some random freeware tool using google. I didn't even keep it long enough to remember what it was called.
As for "saved at smallest size through adobe"... I will say that isn't always the case. It really depends on the settings.
For example, a random 720p image I picked to test with resulted in the following file sizes (when using "Save for Web...").
- PNG (24bit) - 1.1 M
- PNG (8bit) - 251 K
- JPEG (Quality 85) - 328 K
- JPEG (Quality 60) - 146 K
- JPEG (Quality 30) - 59 K
- JPEG (Quality 10) - 35 K
Same image, just differing settings.
My usual "find the right level" is to find an image with a large flat area with almost the same color (sky, doors, windows, dresses, etc)... then compress it. If the resulting image is too blocky and too grainy for my personal tastes... I up the quality level and try again until I'm happy. Then I use that same image quality throughout the project (because I can't be arsed evaluating each and every image). The resulting images are probably bigger than they absolutely could be... but it's a trade off of image quality -vs- my time. Also... there WILL always be images that don't look good when compressed... learn to live with it as long as it remains a tiny percentage of the overall project -OR- learn to love 3GB projects
If it is your own project... then render to the highest quality you can and keep those images separate. Then either photoshop each one as you finish each render or mass convert the whole folder just before (each) release. Personally I would delay compressing/converting images until the last moment - since maintaining two copies of the same images WILL result in something going wrong at some point. You'll re-render something or touch it up or something and your two versions will be out of step. It really depends on your workflow and how careful you are.
