Some time ago, we had to temporarily suspend the Web version of Like Heroes: Ultimate on Nutaku. The suspension is associated with the occurrence of problems in the operation of the Web version that arose due to incorrect optimization of game resources. I will write how to optimize correctly at the end of the article, and now I will talk about the less obvious losses of the game associated with disabling the Web version. 

After turning off the Web version, players began to return to the Android version of the game less often, and the average number of payments in the Android version of LHU decreased significantly. This certainly upset us, and we began research the reasons for such a strong failure. Our investigation allowed us to find out the main reasons for what happened: People want to play how they feel comfortable, and not how the developer wants them to. Although the main mode of Like Heroes is more comfortable to play on your phone, launching an auto battle, watching 2k animations or reading stories is much more convenient in the browser. So people did, they actively played and made purchases from the phone, and the content was conveniently consumed on the computer screen. And when they lost their usual comfort, they left, and they did the right thing, I would also leave. 

An additional problem of the lack of a web version is the loss of efficiency in promoting the game. The banner on the main page of Nutaku is only on the website, but in the Nutaku app Android Store it is not. As a result, players come to the game page, cannot start playing right away and forget about the game forever. In concrete terms, it looks like this: the top banner for a game that has a web version brings 10-15 thousand new players per day, while the same banner for the same game with only the Android version will bring 400-500 new players. The difference is about 25 times, and the cost of the banner is the same.

And finally, the lack of a Web version of the game makes it impossible to promote the game on your own. Literally buying outside ads for an Android game hosted on Nutaku brings people to Nutaku only. In order for players to download the game, they will also need the Nutaku app downloaded, and an account registered. After that, no one will be able to remember what game they came here for.

And now about the correct optimization, this only applies to development on Unity 3D. In order for the game to immediately work normally everywhere, first of all, in the browser, save the atlases of all textures to the power of two. This is a setting when saving an image, you can find it in any editor. If you don't do it yourself, Unity will take over and do everything itself, and do it badly, you will get huge texture atlases that will gobble up all the memory and cause regular game crashes, data loss and insomnia for programmers. Second, if the design of some element has changed in the game. You need to immediately remove the old resources and clean up the old code, at least comment it if the edit is not exactly final. Old resources should be in the developer's backup, and not be added as a cultural-historical layer on the player's disk. And the Deep Code can summon Satan, or even worse, delete the data of the players on the server, as I already know( 

 And of course, you should use DLC to load temporarily data. This will not only speed up the game and allow it to run on most devices, but also make it possible to start playing faster. Nobody likes to wait. 

Now Spicy Team is actively engaged in optimizing Like resources Heroes: Ultimate to bring players back to their usual comfort level. By keeping only the animations of the Adult scenes and skins, we were able to reduce the size of the game by 300 MB and increase the performance in the main game mode by almost 20%, and the scene viewer by 50%. There are still hundreds of power-of-two images to save and a DLC system, which I will talk about the intricacies of implementing when we finish developing and testing it.

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