What do you guys do to finish up and get ready for a game release?

Hey! I'm about ready to release my first game here - and I wanted to know if anyone had any pointers about how you go about
releasing the game, on the site here.

Pretty much I just want to know about the "finishing up" process of the game cycle and what you guys think absolutely needs to be done before releasing a finished game. And I guess how to not kind of freak out about posting your game.

For me it's playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. Noyt the engine's version but the deployed game. I always end up releasing something with a game breaking bug even though I playtested, I find AFTER it's released. Whether it's a missing image or sound, or forgot to close out some loop.

Having outsiders other than yourself test it out is always informative; let's you get out of your own head and see what it might be like to have it played "blind." That aside, trying to do quick playtest runs is another, make sure its playable beginning to end, nothing strange seems to pop up and try and catch as many typos as possible. The last thing you want to do is put a game out there and find out it can't even be finished or has a critical error, script or otherwise.

Also quite important is that you can look at it and feel, "am I happy with what I made here; is this my game?" After you release a game there is no real guarantee; no guarantee people will play it, like it or give you feedback if at all, so you should be happy with what you made from your experience.

Assume all had been done, I delayed the release of the game for about 1-2 weeks for "cleaning it up". This process including finalizing all the resources, compressing, deleting that are not used. Recheck the script, remove unnecessary code that might bloated the game, and checking up dialogue, either for typo or just wrong dialogue direction.

After all the rough cleaning are done, playtest the game. This include replaying from start to finish. Note all need to changes like balancing/map/dialogue that doesn't fit well in game, also note all the known bugs or missing resources. This is the reason why it took one week or even more to finalize the game before it released (unless you're participating jam).

My previous complete game managed to pass almost all game breaking bug due to intensive testing like this (up to the point I almost hate my own game). Although, I missed a game breaking bug on accessing menu due to mistype a one line in a script. But it could be easily patched. Even with that, after I replayed it again, I found a bug that present could be present in hard mode (not necessary, but u died a lot in hard mode which could have a chance to trigger the bug more often), however, no one reported the bug even after thousands ppl downloaded it.

An optional additional step would be getting playtester, either for tracking bugs or to comment your game balance before it released. So you can change stuff before finalizing it and released to public. If you're confident with yourself though, you can skip this part.

Playtesting by people who think differently from you, whose play style is different from yours, whose hardware setup is different from yours. Playtesting by people who are similar to you will not reveal the bug that only shows up if things are done in the 'wrong' order. And relying on playtesting only by yourself is foolish in the extreme.

If your game has more than one possible ending due to choices, then each possibility has to be played through, right up to the end, to ensure it works.

Even if the ending remains more or less the same, if the player can do this having made a significant choice e.g. chosen a different main character, or there is is a relationship system, and that choice impacts significantly on how the game plays, then each possibility has to be played through to completion. Obviously if the choices make little difference then that reduces the necessity, but doesn't eliminate it.

Few things are more off-putting than a game being released and then there is a string of posts detailing the bugs that have been corrected, most of which should have been picked up by ordinary beta testing.

Then it's things like checking that everything that can be compressed has been; that your Credits are complete; that anything that has to be paid for has been; all feedback from testers has been double checked to make sure you've picked up everything from what they say that needs acting on.

Then release, sit back, and begin to bite your nails waiting for player feedback.

Ok - I have some friends who say they'd be happy to test it out for me. Is it normal, for your anti-virus to pick up your newly compressed game as a possible threat? Every time I've exported it - and tested it, my anti-virus would warn me about it. Like if it wasn't me the one that made it - I would have deleted it and gasolined my computer to stop the spread of infection.

So I'm also kind of in the dark personally about the exporting process. Though if I can get it figured out before work I maybe can see what my friends think about it. And decide if I'm gonna push back or not I guess?

And I did notice that my file size was pretty big at 5k - so I've been exporting things from the resource manager so I can delete them. Hoping it helps.
Since I don't imagine people would want a 15-20 minute game taking up a ton of space.

Anti-virus and the like has been an issue for rpg maker users for awhile, I've never had issue with it though mostly cause I just run the default windows defender; I know some flag it more than others. 5k what? mb? kb? 5k mb is quite high even for a long project, I don't think 5k kb would be a deal breaker for anyone though. File sizes can be reduced as well usually with added steps with converters. You can probably find more info already on the forum and Kes could recommend better options as I'm not greatly familiar with them. Certainly making your game an acceptable file size is a step to do before release to the public.

Not sure what engine you are using but I know Ace has a method to deploy the game and run it without detecting the rtp. Basically you trick it into thinking the rtp is detected then you only have to include the files you need in it. There's a thread on the forum somewhere for that but the pics seem to be down; it isn't too complicated though so maybe the wording is enough. The act of exporting itself (going by ace experience, haven't done it in mv yet) normally is simple enough though, you just choose the option in the menu for it and let it do its thing and include rtp or not.

There is a thread here discussing file size and what you can do to reduce it. I think it would be worth going through, as 5k is a lot for such a small game.

Ok - the encrypted data is what seems to be the 5k mb. Though that's still bad. RPG Maker also doesn't seem to want you deleting prebuilt stuff - as they will restore it if you delete it?

Delete it from the game's folder directly and not the resource manager, and make sure there's nothing in the game trying to call on that file. What I did is made a copy of my game and deleted nearly everything in the database that used RTP - every animation, every skill that used one of those animations, every enemy, actor and a lot of the default music tracks, every map that used an RTP tileset and the tilesets themselves etc. so that I would have a copy still with all that in case I needed to bug-fix, and then I deleted the RTP files directly from the game folder and then I exported. This might have been a backwards, complicated way to do it for all I know but it saved me hundreds of megabytes and I probably could have gotten it down lower by deleting the music and sound effects I wasn't using, converting the ones I had to OGG and running my images through a PNG compressor.

So now the game seems to have gone from 5k mb to 52.2 mb.

Not exporting the entire RTP helped, as that doesn't seem to export anything with a blue icon - but you can flag them out of the RTP from the resource manager - so I'm just cherry picking what I used exactly.

The music (which a lot of those links talked about) was the super big killer.
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Okay - so for anyone in my boat, the way to reduce file size is to be on top of everything.
Export any sounds,tiles,etc. your using as you use them.

So that way, when you export you can leave the RTP behind. Which seems to cut down the size a lot. You just need to do a bit of editing to get the font in there. Since it doesn't seem to come on its own accord.

And then change the RTP line in the ini folder.

Though I think this is something that should happen well before release. To save headaches later.

And my friends have already found a lot of spelling errors, so the play testing helps because they are not panicking about the release date.