FreeGameDev

So, now, I'm making a new poll. Hopefully, it will help me figure out what I need to focus on next for my game.

Obligatory link to homepage because OP is lazy: http://wograld.sourceforge.net/

Basically my answer is no, I'm not into MMORPGs. So I'm guess I'm not the target audience, haha.

Oh, but BTW: Holy crap the homepage is a really bad way to present a game.

Basically it's 95% babble about what Wograld isn't and trying to “justify” each of the developer decisions. I mean, it's nice to expose your thought process somewhere, but on the homepage it's just a distraction. From a serious game homepage I expect you to tell me what the actual gameplay is like. At this stage I don't care about dev decisions, just tell me what the game is like. FFS! And no, “it's an MMORPG” is not an useful description. So from the desciption alone I have no clue at all what the core gameplay like is like … All the dev yadda-yadda should have been moved to the “Mission Statement” page or whatever. I suggest to rewrite the introduction text completely.

And, WTF, the sentence “Our Graphics Requirements Are Less Demanding” … I really can't wrap my head around this? Why would you make this as your major “selling point” of your game?

OK, rant over, I'm not into MMORPGs anyway, so whatever.

PS: Oops, I think I accidentally activated “No, this is the first time I even looked at it.” but it turned out I heard from the game before, but only from these forums. Does this count? I think my memory is playing tricks on me.

Wograld ...

Our Graphics Requirements Are Less Demanding

Actually that's an awesome way to advertise a game. Too bad the avatars and perspective look so weird. But hell, you can do Java networking. You don't need to be modest about your programming abilities.

Still, 180 MB for the download, and presumably more to compile it from source. It would take some convincing for me to go through the trouble when there are equally compelling projects with the same level of exposure, such as Ryzom. And I haven't tried that either.

Hey, the game looks awesome! However, I'm deterred by the download size. Why is it so big? (Any old BMPs?)

It has a lot, as in a wide variety of graphics. (different monsters, terrain etc.) It doesn't have old BMPs, just .png (as far as I know anyway. also has over 60 music tracks. (.ogg) There used to be a separate arch folder for the graphics, but I figured having the separate arch folder would make it more complex for an already relatively complex install process.

I'll be honest, I don't consider anything under 700MB to be big. (yeah, maybe I worried about it back when we had 2gb on the hard disk and mostly played things from cd as well has having dial up but now.)

Perhaps you could lower the bitrate and use the OPUS codec (https://opus-codec.org/) to save in the range of +60-90mb?

ironically, the maps (197 MB) (basically the levels, world, towns dungeons etc) folder is larger than the music (113 MB) folder. It is almost 200MB. I can't believe its that much for what should be just text.
Like I said, the project used to be a lot of separate folders, but I've tried to make the install process less complex and easier to understand than the project it forked from (crossfire) . I still don't feel like I have succeeded.