So I’ve just finished a ‘viral’ game for the company I work for and I’m now looking for ways of getting it out to as many people as possible. There seems like a reasonable amount of sites out there where you can submit your Flash games, but here’s what I don’t understand:
The game consists of 1 swf at about 600Kb, and 3 external images, about 50Kb each, which are loaded at neccessary points in the game. To counter the initial 600Kb swf download time, I created another simple swf at about 5Kb which acts as a preloader and container. So this is all very straight forward:
load.swf loads game.swf into it.
So all I need to do, is supply someone with load.swf and game.swf, and they’re set to go - the images are loaded remotely from our server.
BUT - all the sites out there for submitting games to, only seem to allow you to upload ONE swf (per game).
So I’d have to lose the preloader, and simply upload the 600Kb game.swf, which will obviously result in some blank-screen annoying loading time. BUT - this doesn’t seem to be the case - all the flash games you see on these sites ALL have preloaders.
I simply don’t understand. To me, it seems there’s several options, none of which are right:
- Have no preloader. Plainly ridiculous.
- Just upload the 5Kb preloader to the game sites, and have that load the 600KB game.swf from our server. This is certainly a viable option, but it seems to defeat the whole purpose of hosting the game elsewhere. If we host this game on 5 different sites say, we dont want to be hit for 600Kb bandwidth whenever someone from any of those sites plays.
- Incorporate a ‘first-frame’ loader into the game.swf. This seemed like the solution, but it doesn’t really offer a lot of functionality. The swf is still 600Kb, which still has to wait to download before the first frame appears, and once that happens, the game is loaded anyway.
Has anyone got any ideas on this, and also any resources for submitting games to? I’m thoroughly confused.
