Hi everyone!
I have just gotten back into making games again since around 1996, when I made my last game on Klik and Play. I'm a little older now, and perhaps a little wiser, and was trying to get back into making games again.
Since I've been out of it so long, I was hoping to get some suggestions about adding videos to my games.
Is it acceptable?
How big is an acceptable file size for videos?
Any preferred codecs?
Direct Show, AVI, or Quicktime objects. Which one would be the better choice?
I would download it no matter how big the file size was. Pick the codec that gives the best balance of file size and quality and as long as the resultant file size of the game isn't up in the 100+ MB range, you're probably okay. It's hard to put a sticker on the limit of acceptable sizes, especially considering varying things like non-video graphics quality, but 50MB is probably a good target. If you go above that, I think people will most likely still download it if it's good. There will just be a bit of complaining.
There've been a couple of other games that included video cutscenes before. Macabre (check the Klik Museum on this site) used some short videos for the intro. Entrance Gate is also a good example, if you can still download it anywhere.
If the game is good enough, there's no real file size limit as long as it's within a couple of hundred Mb. As OldManClayton said, you can expect some people to complain if it's over 50Mb but they'll probably download it anyway.
Just a word of warning about using videos. I recently had a lot of trouble with an educational game I was making. The videos would play no problem, but I didn't have much control over them. One thing I really needed to do was jump to different parts of the video (either by referencing the frame number or time stamp), but I just couldn't get it to work. I'm still not sure if the problem was my computer or MMF/extensions, but in that case I had to manually split up the video files and do it that way.
Thanks for all the wonderful comments, everyone.
The game will be made using MMF 2. With this game I hope to start small and then use my knowledge to tackle a bigger game I have in mind.
Thanks nim! I will check out those games you mentioned.
Normally you'd say that it's a bad idea to put videos in games, because these days people hate cutscenes and intros, and hate downloading them even more. But I think yours is a pleasant exception
I've used AVI in MMF, but anything that works should be fine, as long as it doesn't increase the size too much.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Wow...I would say those videos are almost as good and professional as the intro video for one of our games... (just kidding)
Seriously, as long as the game itself is very good, I think you can easily include 100 Mb of that high quality video. But if the gameplay doesn't live up to expectations - partly raised by the nice cutscenes - then people will just hate it more because of the extra file size. It all boils down to the quality of the actual game.
So true, MJK! I enjoy making my own movies so I always want to make everything cinematic like that, but have to learn to focus on making the core gameplay good before adding the frills.
lol, I really enjoyed your cutscene. Way better than I could draw by hand
The first cutscene looked very cookie-cutter (cliche, generic), but the second one was very cool! It actually reminded me of the traveling cutscenes from Knights of the Old Republic.
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Pick the codec that gives the best balance of file size and quality and as long as the resultant file size of the game isn't up in the 100+ MB range, you're probably okay. It's hard to put a sticker on the limit of acceptable sizes, especially considering varying things like non-video graphics quality, but 50MB is probably a good target. If you go above that, I think people will most likely still download it if it's good. There will just be a bit of complaining.
(just kidding)
Edited by MJK
