You’re joking, surely? You need all files to play the game, it’s not like there’s a single file that you can use to play the game and everything else is optional. Also, there’s a structure to be maintained. Downloading the game as it is means downloading every single file individually and manually recreating the directory structure. This is not “just grabbing” the files.
EDIT - Also, games like “Solarium” and “Reels” are packed with all files in the big “all games zip file” (whereas some games like “Daughter” just have an index page for online play, so consistency has already gone out the window). So it doesn’t even really make sense that those aren’t available as zips either. We’re not talking about optional files, we’re talking about parts of the game.
Bump since you are apparently ignoring my last post.
Also, there are +20 files that make up Autumn’s daughter, spread in a file directory structure of 11 folders. Tell me again how easy and simple it is to grab them.
I missed your post previously. To your practical question: does your FTP client not allow you to select the root folder containing the game and all of its subdirectories for download?
Autumn’s Daughter wasn’t originally packed in the .zip file because I didn’t have the local files when the competition opened.
I’m not using an FTP client at all, just plain old Firefox. I’ve tried FTP clients in the past, and all in all, it’s just a nuisance. Using a normal browser I can’t select the root folder as you suggest.
Would using your web browser to save the game work? When you’re on the game’s page itself, Save As will have a complete option which will download all the extra files. It may not be the same directory structure but it should still work.
Not with Undum, I’m afraid. From my experience, the only web-based games I can reliably download that way are the Inklewriter games. Twine games work, but I may run into problems (I thought “Howling Dogs” was unplayable offline, I thought it used something fancy, but I had just saved it “as a complete web page” rather than downloading the .html proper).
I mean, I might be able to get something with “Save Web Page As”, but I’d always be wondering if I’m missing something, if it’s broken… no fun.
Thanks for the suggestions, but I really don’t see how making a zip file would be more work than those. [emote];)[/emote]
Mainly I was trying to avoid special-casing that game, as it’s another thing to keep updated and synchronized. As others have said, we need to overhaul how we’re handling files now that games don’t come in one self-contained file like a .gblorb.
In the meantime, I’ve added autumn.zip to the archive.