Ways to shrink files/optimize? I've already lowered the quality to my game's main soundtrack, but it's still 5mb. That in addition to another 5mb of textures, soundeffects, config files, and a readme or two. 10mb + XNA seems really complicated for a decent Breakout game.

Also, best way to draw a techno looking electro-paddle?
I've been screwing around with blender, but graphics aren't really my thing.

And also, should I use pregenerated text for the menu, or draw all the text at runtime? It's not really much of a menu though, more of a screen.

What format are you using for music/sound? What sampling rate?
If you're really worried about the size, you could put smaller, low quality sounds in the initial package and offer a high quality sound pack that overwrites the original samples with better versions as an additional download.

Would a web button type sprite do for the bat and ball? There's plenty of tutorials for doing shiny web 2.0 buttons using Gimp. Here's a start: http://www.youthedesigner.com/2011/02/0 ... with-gimp/

Draw the text at runtime if possible, that way you can add support for other languages fairly easily.

_________________
10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Re Soundtrack size: Have you considered using MIDI songs instead of MP3/OGG encoded audio?

Re Textures: Use PNG format for textures with few colors or that need transparency; use JPEG for everything else.

Re Blender: Do not use Blender for 2D/Raster graphics. Use GIMP or Paint.NET instead. For 3D models etc., Blender is fine. Use a screwdriver on screws and a hammer on nails.

Re Text: Do this at runtime -- makes thing much, much easier to edit, and cuts down on the size of your graphic asset requirements.

If you need any more in-depth answers, ask.

_________________
What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Thanks all! This is easily the best forum yet.

Soundtrack: I don't really know much about MIDI. I kinda had my heart set on this awesome free techno track which I looped.

Textures: 90% of textures are different brick types, which are pretty darn insignificant, maybe 600kb for all of them. The only big thing I can think of is the backgrounds, which isn't done yet.

Blender: I have both gimp and Paint .NET, and prefer .NET by a long shot.

Text: Okeydokey, but how do you advanced programmer guys (and gals) figure out where to draw the text? Trial and error? Guessing?

It just depends on where you want to put the text. It's simplest to have the text at the top-left of the screen (as 2D rendering starts at that corner in general). If you want to put it somewhere else, the most efficient way to do it is to have a screenshot of the game and then decide where to put it. Being that pretty much all graphic editors give X/Y coordinates for the mouse pointer, it's easy to determine the numerical values to plug into your rendering function.

_________________
What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

OK, next question.

My soundtrack occasionally is choppy when I play it (in the game) for more than three minutes at a time. I'm using it as a Song, and running it with MediaPlayer.Play.