Conversion to Play: The Art of Loading

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The video discusses the art of loading in web game development, emphasizing its importance from the start to improve success rates. It highlights the need to optimize game assets, such as using sprite sheets and compressing files, and to make the loading process engaging by setting player expectations and providing visuals. The speaker also mentions the significance of choosing the right game engine, with a preference for engines that stay close to JavaScript to minimize overhead. Additionally, the video addresses procedural art, generating environments with math, and using tools like Spine 2D for animations. The importance of loading assets as needed and keeping the path to play clear is stressed, with examples of successful games like Apple Knights and Stickman Hook. The speaker also touches on personal projects and the importance of audience fit for technologies like WebXR and blockchain in gaming.

From Author:

On the web, games are not pre-installed, but downloaded at the moment of play. Therefore the loading experience is a key part of your game’s success. During this talk Poki’s Kasper Mol will introduce you to the Conversion to Play concept, and what methods are available to nail this.

This talk has been presented at JS GameDev Summit 2022, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

FAQ

The speaker is Kasper from the Netherlands. He is a tech lead at Pokey and has over eight years of experience in the web game industry. He is also an indie web game developer with personal projects like Supernova and Joyrider.

Pokey is a web game platform with around 30 million monthly active users. It aims to create the ultimate online playgrounds and set new standards for web games. Pokey collaborates directly with about 300 game developers and offers both mobile hits and original web game productions.

The loading experience is crucial because web games are not pre-installed. Users must download the game at the moment of play, which presents an initial hurdle. A poor loading experience can significantly reduce the number of players who actually get to play the game.

'Converse to Play' is a metric defined to keep track of the percentage of users who visit a game's page and actually end up playing the game. It measures the moment from when a player views the game page until they start playing.

Key factors include picking the right engine, optimizing assets, making loading interesting, loading things only as they are needed, and keeping the path to play clear.

Tips include using the correct file extensions (PNG vs JPEG), compressing assets, putting images into sprite sheets, using bitmap fonts, and removing unnecessary characters from custom font files.

You can make the loading experience more engaging by setting expectations for the game, showing key art, screenshots, game controls, and indicating how big the game is. Testing on slower machines and throttling your connection can also help you understand the average user's experience.

Loading assets as they are needed allows the game to start more quickly by only downloading essential assets initially. Additional assets can be downloaded during gameplay or menu screens, improving the overall loading speed and experience.

A good target for web game file size is under 5 megabytes for an excellent job, and under 10 megabytes for a good job. Every megabyte counts in improving the loading experience and 'Converse to Play'.

For his first game, Kasper used Tree.js. For his second game, he switched to Pixi.js for graphics and Box2D for physics. He also built his own framework on top of RxJS for better control over the code.

Kasper Mol
Kasper Mol
31 min
08 Apr, 2022

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Video Transcription

1. Introduction to the Art of Loading in Web Games

Short description:

Today I want to talk to you about the art of loading and its impacts on creating a web game. Being aware of this from the start of your game development can greatly improve your chances of success.

Hi, everyone. It's good to be here. This is, I think, one of the first conferences dedicated specifically to web games. So I felt I really needed to be here, because that's something that I've been spending most of my professional life on.

So today I want to talk to you about the art of loading and the impacts of that on what we think is one of the most important things to consider when you want to create a web game. And being aware of this and taking it into account from the start of your games development will greatly improve your chances of success.

So I'll be covering a broad range of topics. Instead of diving into one thing very deeply, my goal is mostly to build awareness and make you care. So yeah, let's start.

2. From Indie Developer to Tech Lead at Pokey

Short description:

Today I want to talk to you about the art of loading and its impacts on creating a web game. Being aware of this from the start of your game development can greatly improve your chances of success.

First of all, let me introduce myself. So my name's Kasper. I live in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam, and I'm a tech lead at Pokey, where I've been working for quite some years now. In total, I have about eight plus years of experience in the web game industry. And next to that, I'm also an indie web game developer.

So the two games you can see here on the left, Supernova, on the right, Joyrider are two of my personal projects. I'm very proud of them. Give them a play if you ever have a chance.

Also, a little bit about Pokey, in case you don't know us yet. So Pokey is a web game platform. You can see our homepage here. We have about 30 million monthly active users. And we're trying to build the ultimate online playgrounds and setting new standards for web games. I think we're most proud of, though, our direct relationships with about 300 game developers, ranging from big established studios to one man teams who have built their business from the ground up on our platform. Things we do range from bringing mobile hits like Subway Surfers and Stickman Hoops to web, to reviving Flash classics into HTML5 such as Bubble Trouble, the Nitrome Collection and Impossible Quiz, as well as making new original web game productions possible such as Plumgy Rockets or Narrow One. Give us a visit when you have some time on desktop or mobile on poki.com.

So, as I mentioned, this talk is about the conversion to play so you should probably know what it is and also why you should care about it. So let's just start by saying that of course web is on demand. Games on web are a bit different from games on other platforms because they're not pre-installed. They're downloaded at the moment of play. That means users see something they like, they click and then at that moment they have to download the game before they start playing. So this is an initial hurdle for players to enjoy or even try again and that makes it very important. The loading experience really is key. If this is done wrong or if it's ignored it's going to have some pretty substantial consequences. So we've seen games where only 20% of interested people would end up playing, which is a very small amount and it means you're losing lots of players before they even get to the thing that you're probably very proud of, which is your game.

So, Converse to Play. It's basically the name for the metric we've defined to keep track of this specifically. You can see here on the flow kind of how it works. So on the left, a player sees the thumbnail of your game. They click on it.

QnA

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