I think my big problem is - how does this compare with a simple video demo, hosted on youtube or vimeo or some place like that? Are there many people who would be convinced to download by a demo like this, that wouldn't be convinced by a video trailer?
Videos default to small size (can be hard to read text) and advance at their own speed rather than yours.
Also, not everyone knows how to make videos.
I suspect there could be use for a special browser demo service, but I dont know if there's ENOUGH use to it to be worth the trouble.
Trailers and even video using in game content can be misleading, and most game players (and movie goers for that matter) know this fact well, so they prefer demos. But papillon is right. A want for this sort of thing is certainly there. Just.. perhaps not enough.
It works really well at 52 ms. I was surprised. (used google chrome) I would definitely want to have this as a demo. If I showed at a recent contest something like this I might have gotten some $25K CDN funding. I think investors would definitely be interested into making something like this into some kind of service. Everyone has been going "cloud" computing.
How well can this scale? Can I get some info on the bandwidth, cpu/memory usage? Also if this is session-state based how much does each session cost in cpu/memory?
I think my big problem is - how does this compare with a simple video demo, hosted on youtube or vimeo or some place like that? Are there many people who would be convinced to download by a demo like this, that wouldn't be convinced by a video trailer?
For the jpeg-ish display it still works well. I can just put a disclaimer with some actual screenshots beside it and say "If you want higher-quality then buy the game". With this you can let people actually try out the game itself as opposed to video.
Last edited by Counter Arts on Fri May 13, 2011 1:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The bandwidth is displayed as the game is shown, although it varies based on how much of the screen is being updated at the moment. Right now, it takes about 70MB/process, although I could probably drop that down quite a bit if it was necessary. CPU is trivial at the moment - it doesn't register on my computer.
I'll note that I'm not terribly interested in making a browser-gaming service - this isn't a good way of doing it, and I like the idea of having downloaded copies - centrally hosted games are awfully error-prone.
Supporting creators since 2004 (When was the last time you backed up your game?)
PyTom wrote:I'll note that I'm not terribly interested in making a browser-gaming service - this isn't a good way of doing it, and I like the idea of having downloaded copies - centrally hosted games are awfully error-prone.
I wouldn't want to use it for a full game. But having some small promotional things might be cool. It would be an interesting way to do a dev blog to show what you have so far.
Unless the server has been disabled the demo failed to launch on my Samsung Galaxy Tab froyo 2.0 with all tested browser (internal, Dolphin HD, Skyfire beta and Opera mini)