Determining minimal/recommended requirements when launching

Riocide

Hey everyone,

We're currently in the process of launching Monsters and Medicine on the humble store and one of the the requested pieces of information from their side are the minimal/recommended pc specs for the game. Currently we're a bit flummoxed on how to go about this.

Can some of the people here who have actually gone through the process maybe advise us on how you went about determining these figures?

Chippit

This sort of stuff is 70% measuring and testing and 30% guesswork, really.

Depending on how much performance testing you've done, and on how many different machines, you should be able to infer an expected CPU spec. That one is the most guesswork of the lot, really, since it's sort of difficult to calculate it in any objective way given how complex games are, and how complex the PCs they're running on are.

GPU requirements are the most scientific of the lot: Those you can usually work out pretty accurately given the technology that you're using, what sort of graphical effects you have and the intensity of your game. Usually smaller games don't specify much more than the lowest required shader model, and that is generally a known quantity (probably SM2).

Memory requirements are also pretty measurable, especially if you've done any profiling while developing. For a small indie game, take your highest memory usage, round it up to your nearest power of two (double if it's close), and use that.

All in all, these sorts of things are never 100% accurate, especially on PC where you can always expect any two users to have vastly different machines. A little bit of elaboration won't do you any harm, really, and always err on the higher side. For the most part, I don't actually expect too many people pay much attention to system requirements for smaller titles and indie games, unless they're expecting to run it on a netbook. Which basically means you should test on a netbook. :p

dislekcia

We thumbsucked mostly... Stuff like CPU spec we just went around testing the game on the oldest hardware we could find. When it still worked we picked the next highest up category just to be safe. GPU was pretty easy, as was HDD space.

Hey, @hermantulleken, this should totally be a plugin for Unity! Run it to estimate the minspec for your project ;)

dislekcia

Chippit said:

unless they're expecting to run it on a netbook. Which basically means you should test on a netbook. :p

You'd be surprised how many people do seem to want to play things on netbooks, especially games that they see as being "quick" or "approachable". Netbook people care about completely different things: Our biggest complaint with DD was that the game drained battery too much on Netbooks and made them run hot. Dropping the framerate seemed to make them feel better, even if it made the game less responsive on that system. Weirdness.

Riocide

Thanks for the feedback guys. Time to go find a bunch of old PC's to test on :)

Chippit

dislekcia said:

Chippit said:

unless they're expecting to run it on a netbook. Which basically means you should test on a netbook. :p

You'd be surprised how many people do seem to want to play things on netbooks, especially games that they see as being "quick" or "approachable". Netbook people care about completely different things: Our biggest complaint with DD was that the game drained battery too much on Netbooks and made them run hot. Dropping the framerate seemed to make them feel better, even if it made the game less responsive on that system. Weirdness.

I won't be surprised at all. That's why I brought that up! :P

Squidcor

For Tom Sparks we approached this from the opposite direction. We had a look a the Steam hardware survey to see what people were actually using, and then we optimised to make sure the game would run on 95% of machines.