PocketMatrix

Hello all... I'm beginning early work on K&G Arcade 2, and one of the first questions I was asking myself was whether I wanted to do it in VGA or not.

I decided not (for now), and I wanted to bring my reason here and see if I'm missing something. The short answer: memory.

Atlantis: Redux and Gilbert Goodmate not withstanding, I still think a sucessful PocketPC game has to be fairly easy on memory requirements. I think 10MB storage memory max and < 10MB program memory to run are the limits of what most people accept, and the program memory is the more important issue.

When I was thinking about K&G 2, it ocurred to me that just my Omnytex logo alone would require 134K memory during execution (240x280x2) and that was assuming I didn't scale it up to be the same proportions in VGA (then we'd be talking about 537K).

That doesn't even get into what's required for the game to run. Just thinking about the first K&G Arcade, some parts of it would need 5MB in images loaded alone, that doesn't even include audio.

Now certainly the game can be architected to be as efficient with what's loaded at any given time as possible (and I'm doing that no matter what), but even doing that, it can still work out to a lot.

So, my question(s) to you all are these...

First, am I off-base with what users will accept in terms of memory usage? What numbers (program memory and storage memory) are acceptable, generally?

Second, am I exaggerating the memory requirements of a VGA game in general? Clearly it depends on game type and other factors, but it's obviously more than a comparable QVGA game. Is the difference generally as much as I'm implying?

Third, does it mean that, at least with the current crop of VGA devices and the memory they contain, that by and large the VGA PocketPC game market is DOA? There's already some VGA games out, and certainly there will be plenty more, but are people going to accept the extra memory requirements for them do you think?

Maybe I should just ask this question instead...

If K&G Arcade 2 needs 20MB storage memory and 15MB program memory to run (which is roughly what I would expect doing it in VGA), is this going to be acceptable to most users? Of course it depends on whether they like the game or not, but are those numbers going to influence someone who might be on the fence, or is it not going to be a factor?

Thanks all!

Frank,

I've done some research about this a while back before we created the PC version of Traffic Jam and here are my thoughts on it.

1. I think a 20/15MB space requirement for K&GII is acceptable for VGA devices because they have bigger memory (> 100MB) than their QVGA counterparts.

2. The smaller you can make your filesize, still the better because people still think that these are PDAs and that space is limited. They don't want to waste too much space on a software unless they really love (and I mean really) the game and they want to keep it.

3. Creating a VGA version of your game will also let you tap the PC downloadable game market, not just Pocket PCs. Traffic Jam has been released on various sites around the net and its pretty much doing okay for us.

4. Plan out your game carefully, I'm sure you'll find some elements where you can save space like tiling background images, reusing artworks, using drawing functions like rectangles, circles in exchange for real images, making your company logo to fit the small screen and not look too small on a VGA screen, etc.

BTW, I did drop you an email weeks ago but I'm not sure if you received it. Let me know so I'll resend it.

Regards,

Erick

I don't remember getting the eMail. It's more than possible I mis-filed it as spam (I still scan my mail manually, so I do sometimes wipe out something I shouldn't). Yes, please resend it for sure, I'll be more careful this time!

Thanks for the input on the size. I'm not really worried about file size so much as program memory. I said 20MB, but I think I can come in under that, maybe as little as half. I am planning on high efficiency, and actually the first K&G was rather thrifty with resources. But this one is going to have larger cut scenes, and while I have some ideas on how to minimize them, they are still going to be fairly large. The game itself doesn't take much ironically.