Over the weekend Against the Wall won People’s Choice at Long Island University’s PlayExpo. It’s a small competition, and was a good opportunity to show my game off.
All of my efforts to promote my game have been paying off. However, this also led to me hitting the data transfer limit on my website yesterday. I upgraded my account to allow for 100GB more data transfer, but I am already about to hit the new limit. I will eventually have to start hosting my game on a service such as Amazon S3. For now, however, it has been my goal to reduce the game’s file size.
To do this, I began playing around with a piece of middleware called Substance Designer. It’s a program that lets you create textures that are generated through code. It’s actually pretty crazy. Before, the brick textures took up 100 MB on my drive uncompressed. With the procedural texture, the bricks take less than 1 MB. This has reduced the download size of the game by half. Plus, the graphics look a whole lot cleaner and nicer when prepared by this program.
One last note: I’m looking forward to the Ludum Dare this weekend. It will take a nice chunk of time out of my main game’s development, but I need a breather from constantly working on it.
Does Substance Designer let you make a texture and then generates a code that can display it or something like that?
It can do that. The full version let’s you use procedurally generated noise first as a base, and make one with no bitmap at all. The bitmap is compressed too, fitting into the 640k output file (DXT1, I’m guessing). It’s sweet, but the pricetag is > $500 for Unity Pro users. Still have some Kickstarter money that I’ll use the get a licence.
Yikes! Thats pricey, at least by my standards. Sound like a neat tool though. Will be interesting to see what ya will be able to make of it.