Options for conserving flashgame file space?

(Quang Tran) #1

I hope this is the right place. I’m making a flashpunk game and I’m trying to keep the file under 20 megs. The thing that take up the most space is the music…

I’m wondering what options do I have to keep music file sizes low. Help is greatly appreciated.

(Justin Wolf) #2

There’s a few options you can take:

  1. Use shorter music.
  2. Use loops instead of complete songs.
  3. Reduce the bit rate of your music.

Depending on how good you want/need your music to sound, usually anywhere between 56-96 kbps is good enough for a flash game. Music is more or less turned off when players play. I usually stick with around 64 kbps if my music track is over a minute, 96 if it’s 30 seconds or less. I guess this also depends on how many tracks you have in your game. If you’ve got one track, then you can keep your bit rate sort of high because the file size won’t weigh too heavily. If there’s many tracks, you’ll definitely have to compress 'em down.

While music and sound effects are definitely the main culprits in file size, you should also take a look into compressing your images as well. Throw them through TinyPNG and see if you can scrape off a chunk of file size with that. It compresses graphics quite well with almost no visible deterioration.

(Quang Tran) #3

Darn, guess there’s no magic bullet. I’ll probably be reducing the bit rate of the music then.

And I did not know about TinyPNG. Thanks!

(JP Mortiboys) #4

You could always make your music as MOD files and play it with flod - that would keep the filesize down!