Is it possible to create a low bandwidth, 15 minute visual novel under 5MB?

[olivia_tinker]

I'm wondering if it's possible to create visual novels with super low band width (ie, 5MB or less) and what sort of capacity (art and tech) is possible within that limitation?

[adamstan]

Well - DOS version of Sakura no Kisetsu is 5MB. So definitely it's possible And it looks pretty good if you ask me.

 

Edited June 5, 2018 by adamstan

[olivia_tinker]

Thanks for the helpful information! Excuse my ignorance - is the DOS version something one can download onto their computers or mobile devices? Thanks!

[adamstan]

It was meant to run under MS-DOS operating system on PC (the game was released in 1996). Currently it works all good under DOSBox emulator. The game itself can be downloaded in this version from various "abandonware" sites.

Edited June 5, 2018 by adamstan

[Ningen]

There are quite a few VNs for the pc98 with a size of 5mb

For example Angel Halo       or Reijou Monogatari

[olivia_tinker]

Wow - thanks for all of the great recommendations, everyone! Super helpful.

[Narcosis]

15 hours ago, olivia_tinker said:

I'm wondering if it's possible to create visual novels with super low band width (ie, 5MB or less) and what sort of capacity (art and tech) is possible within that limitation?

I don't think it's really possible nowadays, depending on what and how much do you want to add. Old games arten't any comparison of sorts - they didn't weight much mostly because they operated in ultra low resolutions and very limited color pallettes, had no voice overs and music was limited to a couple midi/fm/mod tunes at most. As much as those games could easily fit onto a couple old floppy disks, modern games work on much higher parameters and as such, their requirements grew exponentially. Obviously, you will want that, because it's considered a standard for nowadays software (32bit graphics with at least 720p resolution output + full mouse and keyboard support), that allows decent enough experience and ease of use.

It is still possible to create lightweight games, albeit that would require some knowledge on how to optimally reduce the filesizes of your games assets and/or utilize techniques, that allow massive reduction of space and little to no cost in terms of quality degradation. You might be interested to check out Ren'Py. As much as it probably won't be possible to fit a game under 5 megabytes (due to it's shared libraries, that are required to run games), you can still make games, that won't weight more than 25-50 megabytes at most (depending on how much content you'd like to fit). Creating retro-esque games are one such possibility. such games (or software in general) mimic the old hardware limitations from an aesthetic/visual standpoint, which in end makes them much more lightweight and less demanding in terms of required computing power (as such, they can potentially work on much older/slower computers without any discernible performance loss).

Anything below would probably require you to switch to either one of self-sufficient web-based engines (as Palas mentioned above), or resign from advanced sound environment and modern, high-res graphics. In other words - a text based game.