What is a good app size for a Flash Game?

[oruga]

The absolute minimum should be 500x400 as there are ads this size you wouldn't want to miss. As mentioned earlier, 640x480 is ideal.

Size, the lighter the better, never go beyond 10 MB, aim for 5 MB. Use global objects and reuse them, also learn how to compress your audio files so they sound good but are not too heavy, those are the ones that take most of the space.

When you are debugging your game try to have less than 100 active objects per frame, it may run well as an EXE but when converted to Flash the active object overload will slow it down. If you have a large frame level try to split it into several sections to fix this.

[oruga]

So, if I'm understanding this correctly,..you can't can't have a scrolling game in flash that is more than 800x600? I''ve seen plenty of games that have larger frame sizes than 800x600!? Am I missing something or is that just the initial frame size? I also read in a post on this site that under 50 megs for flash!?,but not 100% sure of this.

The frame can be bigger than that, as big as you want, is the resolution (the window you see the game through) which should be 640x480. Just don't have too many active objects on that frame. Aim for 100 +/-.

50 megs is way too much, ideal size should be 5-10 megs.

[Fernando]

Thanks for the links FVivolo.

Still seems that the file size is all over the place, from under 1mb to 10mb. Did I miss something?

Marv

Well Marv,

the concept of size (MB) is that the user have to download the game each time he want to play so developer consider this size in order to keep the download below 2 minutes .

[nivram]

Ah. That makes sense. Never thought about that side of things. So, although there are no standards on size, make it the smallest you can for the user.

Marv

[MJK]

The file size "limit" depends on 1) developer's objective, 2) type of game, and 3) target audience.

If your objective is NOT to monetize the game or maximize the amount of plays, replays, user satisfaction, etc, then size does not matter.

But as a sensible developer you probably care about those things as well. In that case, the file size limit depends a lot on the type of the game and its target audience. If it's some huge strategy game, for example, you could find a sponsor who doesn't matter of file size over 15 Mb. The target audience for these types of games differ from the average casual flash player, and so does their expectations towards game loading time, among many other things.

On the other hand, if your game is a typical time-killer mini-game, you should benchmark average loading times of a couple of dozen of games e.g. on miniclip.com or some other popular portal and then combine your own game's loading time to those. If your game loads significantly longer than the benchmark games, then you have a file size problem. 5Mb starts to be quite large size already for these type of games.

[King_Cool]

Thanks guys
Following the links here in this tread made me find out about sound and image compression, wich in turn will reduce file size.

I know there is an mp3 compressor in MMF2 Application Propertys.
Does this compressor work for .ogg files?

Is there any point in compressing graphics ( like large backgrounds or graphics ) by for example using this Website http://www.punypng.com/ when using MMF2?

[redpandagames]

This is based on my experience of uploading my games to over 100s of websites manually. The major sites like kongregate and newgrounds have 20mb and 10mb limits. Many smaller sites have a limit of 6mb or so.

There isn't really a standard, but I have run into issues with game size (not being able to upload), so that's why I said definitely under 20, as kongregate isn't the only major site with this kind of limit. Really serious gamers will wait for more than 20mb, but most people will give up.

So, that's why I said those were good sizes.