The Challenge: Ren'Py and Web Browsers

UPDATE: We were able to reduce the game build. The entire build is now under 300 MB and it was released to the public today!

We have published several Ren'Py games. There is a lot to like about the platform. And we're very happy to see that it now supports game builds for the web browser.

However, there are still some challenges that we're facing to make the lovely images from Open Worlds Play look great on your screen!

We want to avoid the "pixelating" of images that can occur when a game image is still loading. When this happens, Ren'Py delivers a low-res copy of the image briefly, until the full image has downloaded and then loaded by your browser.

This results in a brief "pixelating" of the image.

There are a few ways to handle this but so far they have not worked well for us. For now, what seems to work best is to tell the system to load all of the game images into RAM. This works great because RAM is fast.

But, this means that we have a large file of images. And this large file must be downloaded and then kept in memory while playing the game.

This large image file for Open Worlds Play is around 400MB! (Update: the image file was reduced to 123MB.)

... stay tuned. We are still exploring and testing.

We hope you can play Open Worlds Play very soon. (You can play it in your browser now. Enjoy!)

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