Post by kjmitch in THE SHORE -demo- comments

Viewing post in THE SHORE -demo- comments

What I posted earlier:

It’s genuinely concerning how difficult it is to download your demo. You likely don’t want such a huge obstacle keeping people from trying your game.

Fix the download link, make it one working link, and host the files wherever itch.io recommends to make the game installable through itch.io’s desktop installer. Fix these issues and you’ll be doing one less thing to hurt your game getting an audience.

At very least, don’t package the game files in a .rar file, that’s ridiculous. Compress as a regular .zip file, those are ubiquitous and recommended: https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-started#content

Good luck.

I wasn’t very nice in this comment, and I apologize for that. But I wasn’t mean, either, and I only wanted to help.

Dr-Flay3 years ago

itch limit the size of files they will distribute via their servers, hence many devs split the archive.
You can get a bigger allowance but there is still a limit.

Rar or 7Zip is as valid a format as any if you have the apropreate software installed. Most OSs do support the old 1980s format PKZIP, but in the decades since we have moved on so the files can be smaller by a huge margin, and in the case of RAR also include a recovery record so corrupt downloads can be rebuilt.
I even use Rar files with Amiga OS (a 90s computer) because it is so widely supported and used.

My solution would be make the distro as a multipart SFX-RAR, so all you have to do is double-click the exe and let it unpack itself.
Or simply advise users that this is a multipart RAR archive so you need to have Winrar, Winzip or 7zip etc. installed to unpack it (all are free and small).