Almost every answer here is a capture tool, so here is the other half — how to make one that fits a size limit and still looks good 🎮
GIF size scales with width × height × fps × duration, and duration is the knob nobody turns. A long clip spends its entire budget on length and then gets shrunk to a postage stamp to fit. Measured on one of my own clips against a 3 MB budget:
- full 14 seconds → 360×202
- same clip trimmed to 6 seconds → 456×256
Same budget, noticeably bigger picture. So pick the 4-6 seconds that actually show the mechanic and cut the rest BEFORE you start reducing resolution. A GIF looping on one clear action beats a whole round played out at postage-stamp size, and it reads better on a page too.
Two smaller ones in the same spirit:
Crop the dead space around your playfield before encoding. Captures usually carry a lot of empty border, and throwing it away is free resolution at any budget — it costs you nothing visually.
Drop framerate before you drop width. 15fps reads as smooth, 12 is acceptable, below 10 starts to look broken. Going 15 → 12 buys you a fifth of the file for far less damage than shrinking the picture does.