I'm going to be writing a custom installer for the application we are releasing soon. The main reason for this is to be able to customize the installation process graphically to a much greater degree (think skinnable) and gain more control over things like introducing the user to the program and letting him/her immediately and easily select the options best suited for them. Since it is based on the same custom application development engine as the application that we are releasing, things like skinnability, plugins to allow custom code, and an interface layout script are already available and have been in development for the past year.

Now for my question, are today's installation systems lacking, and if so, how? Would polishing this installer up to release quality and selling it at a reasonable price be a reasonable idea? How many people here are interested in an installer that allows them greater control over the installation without requiring learning a complicated scripting language that a whole book could be written on? (for complex custom operations the installer supports plugin dlls that can be written in C++ which most people here presumably already know). The installer would be targetted at shareware developers and focus on their needs (small size, easy to work with, game developers can quickly create a completely customized interface to match the game, etc).

Also, how much of an impression does a program's installation make on you? It is after all the first thing you see when you run FreeTrialForThisCoolGame.exe...

I donno... As a game consumer I personally really detest fancy graphical installers. Nothing hurts me more than to put in some commercial game and have it start playing music and displaying movies while I'm installing. I feel great however when the little install app from innosetup or ghost installer pops up. Standard, reliable, won't screw around with my system and so on... On the other hand I feel bad when the isntaller was generated using Installshield which just feels clunky and akward. Anyone else feel the same way? or do you guys like fancy installs?

I prefer non-fancy installs. Having a background image, or something is fine, but if it deviates at all from a standard interface, then I have to think, and at that point, I start getting upset. I don't want to think about the install, I want to play the game. The Westwood Studio installers are a very good example of what NOT to do.

And just a note, Ghost Installer is completely skinnable.

Okay just to clarify, no sound or movies or fullscreen type fancy, think just a nice installer that happens to look different (and themed more closely with the actual game) than the 10 000 other installers out there. I have a concept shot that is not quite finished, but think the next logical step to something like www.lizardsoft.com/emoticons.php. The purpose is to provide a more identifiable first impression, and also more practical things like a quick tour of the application (or whatever works best for the program being installed), not assault the user with animated explosions.

I prefer a simple installer. Currently using Spoon Installer for New Star Soccer, which is free, which i like...

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/developer-spoon-installer.htm

Ever since someone here at this board turned me on to InnoSetup, i've been using it ever since

I also prefer a simple installer (and we've been using InnoSetup and really liking it).

In my view, the installer is a Windows app, it's not the game (it just happens to be an app that is going to install a game). So I prefer a simple installer that does it's job as quickly as possible so that the user can get into the game.

I do like the idea of having the user be able to set some "first run" options (video and sound stuff, for example). However, you can do this pretty easily by just popping up a dialog before you do anything "dangerous" (mode switching, etc.) the first time you run.

On the other hand, it probably doesn't matter what I like...it matters what the users like...maybe they prefer a more "themed" installer? :)
-Scorpio

I've seen hundreds of game installers over the past year, and I vastly prefer the clean, simple standard look. Whenever an installer does something differently, it just makes the process take longer and increases my cognitive workload at a point where I just want to get into the game, and this doesn't endear me to the developer. I suggest putting all that extra work into the game itself, and just use something simple like Inno Setup to crank out a clean installer quickly and easily.

Personally, the free installers out there already are fine for me. I don't think I'd take advantage of a skinnable one.

I actually want to put as little effort as possible into the installer, because it takes away from the effort I need to put into the game. So I'm all for installers Like InnoSetup where I can have something built in a few minutes.


I know this is beyond the scope of your question, but what the hell: I think the skinning an installer is a cool idea but it could be a two-edged sword. I'd try and keep the steps as standard as possible, becuase the installer isn't the place to be introducing custom UI elements, new types of dialogs. it can throw people off/turn people off even before the game in installed.

~Hanford

As a non-coder/designer and just a gamer I really like games that start the game experience with the install process. Although they wer'nt indie games, the installs for Broken Sword 1 and for Interstate 76 were awesome. BS had a little breakout game you could play as the real game installed. I76 has concept art and fake news clippings go across the screen as a "radio" played music and news reports in the background.

There's nothing I hate more than a dull install program that leaves me no choise but to jump to another program as it does its thing. For example, I just started playing the "There" beta tonight and almost gave up during the install. Took forever and all it gave me was a progress meter. It left me totally un-interested in playing the game. But... with indie games I guess it's not as much of an issue since most of them install pretty quickly. With larger games such as Stacscape, Fables, and Anito I think a fairly customized and themed install is a must. Otherwise it just shows lazyness or poor artistic design ethic on the part of the developers.

I think a fairly customized and themed install is a must. Otherwise it just shows lazyness or poor artistic design ethic on the part of the developers.

Really? Laziness?

My take has always been that the Installer is not the game, so it should be as standard, straightforward, and familiar as possible. With shareware, they're playing the free one first to see if they want the full one. And they can't play it until they install it, so I don't think it's the right time to throw customers curves. But then again, I'm someone who doesn't like customized or non-windows-standard UIs on anything but games. When the UI is not standard, it increases the user's cognitive load and it takes more thought for them to do the same actions.People subconsiously wonder what else is not standard... what may be different?

Personally, full-screen installers make me weary of the product -- that's a windows 3.1 thing and I'd libel to wonder what year the product was made. Even if it is showing me concept art.

~hanford

Thanks for the input everyone, it's really helping me to flesh out the idea. I agree that the user interface should be familiar and any graphical elements should be there to enhance the process, rather than creating user confusion and frustration. The goal afterall is to hype the user about your program before it is even run, which I'm thinking can help make demos more effective. If the game or application begins to suck you into its world or concept before it's even fully on your drive, it certainly can improve the overall user enthusiam and interest. Like a few people noted above, there are games out there that do this and manage to transform the normally irritating install process into a positive experience.

To add more to the discussion: I've noticed many times that people, including myself, will sometimes download a software trial, install it, but never get around to actually trying it. I've witnessed this almost exclusively with games. While I can't speak for others that do this, I tend to usually run into this situation when I download a demo on impulse. If I stumble upon a game while doing something else (eg. reading a forum or looking for reviews on another game) I'm rarely interested in trying it right away, but it looked just interesting enough to stow away for later (and subsequently be forgotten). Anyone else experience this behavior? Could an interesting (in a positive, not annoying way) install be enough to get you to immediately start playing a game that you would have otherwise put aside? I don't think this phenomena occurs often enough to necessarily have a significant impact on sales, but I just remembered this and would like to know how many other people do this. :D

Originally posted by hanford_lemoore
Really? Laziness?

My take has always been that the Installer is not the game, so it should be as standard, straightforward, and familiar as possible. With shareware, they're playing the free one first to see if they standard, it increases the user's cognitive load and it takes more thought for them to do the same actions.People subconsiously wonder what else is not standard... what may be different?

Maybe it's because I'm approaching it from the view of just a gamer, nothing else. Not a techie and not a developer. I understand that the point of the installer is to get it running on your machine as quickly as possible, but as a gamer I want the whole experience. For example, i hate when games show me music unpacking in some sort of DOS window, it doesn't accomplish anything on my end. I would rather be shown some cool looking character renders, or good quality concept sketches. It's not like showing something worthwhile during the install adds a significant amount of time to the install anyway.

I think manuals might be a good analogy as well. Some developers choose to just give you a text file, while others go the extra mile and give you something that tempts you to print it out (the KQ2 remake from Tierra for example, or the user created manual for Laser Squad Nemesis), it stands out. Give me other reasons to love the game than just the game itself. Let me get to know the charcters, go ahead and suck me into their world via the game, but start working on me from the first minute I find out about the game.

I'm oldschool in the sense that the game playing experience begins when i first crack open the box (or go to the website). Installing is just another step in the whole game experience. All too often I download a game from a bland looking website and stare at a default windows looking installer as I wait for what I hope is a good game to load up.

Look at Monolux for example. As soon as you check out the website you get a feel for the funky space age retro vibe that you're going for. Hell, you can even gather that from your business card. Going to the website I think "ok, I see where they're going with this. Kitchy looking robot, jetsons/tomorrow land kinfa feel." It had me prepared to meet the character and get involved with his adventures. With the pic on the left side your installer is good given the extremely small size of the game itself. But if It took 4 minutes to install I would expect more. Ok, maybe not full screen, but I would want to learn about Rocknor through various pictures of him in different situations. I am about to get involved in his bad day afterall.

I'm somewhat reluctant to point out the other side of the spectrum because I don't want to pick on anyone, but I will anyway. Forgive me Cliffski, we all love ya, and you're good at taking constructive criticism so here it is. If I go the Positech website I don't expect to have a big overriding theme to the experience since it's the developer/publisher site, it would be nice but certaily not expected. But go to the Starlines Inc. page and try and figure out what the game is about without reading. I realize it sounds silly but I like to jump to a games webpage and look at the pictures, screenshots, and overall design to get a feel for the game. Truth be told, I knew about Starlines Inc. quite some time ago but didn't even know what it was about. I thought it was a MOO clone. I know that the nature of the game itself would make it a bit difficult, but I think that giving the webpage itself a theme that matches the game would help. Get me into the idea that I'm going to be running the most bad ass intergalactic shipping company around. Make me excited to play this game before I can even finish downloading it. Bullet-points and review quotes are nice, but I've gotten to the point where I totally block them out unless they're in a different section and link back to the actual review. This way I can get a real opinion of the game itself.

Anyway, I hope I'm not out of place on any of this since I'm far from an expert. But as a hardcore gamer who spends at least a couple hundred dollars on indie games every month I want stuff to stand out. Otherwise it's just another game I downloaded and forgot to play after I installed it because it didn't stand out.

Command and Conquer had the best install programs. There was so much animation and you could read the main points of the game as it progressed in installation. The best part was when you had to enter the cd-key, you had 15 seconds to do so and it made me feel like some kind of hacker. It didn't actually quit on 15 seconds though which is good for slowpokes.

Of course, the game was pretty much bug-free so it's not like the developers skimped on the gameplay and made an awesome installer.

Yeah, I was gonna mention Command and Conquer as having the best installer ever. It was right when windows 95 came out, and all the games were still in DOS and didn't use standard installers. The installer had a name: EVA, I think, and the VERY FIRST thing you did was enter your sound card parameters, and then the rest of the install, EVA spoke the instructions in a "the spacecraft will self destruct in 10 minutes" kind of voice.

Back before installers were standardized, every installer was different anyway, so having it tricked-out like that was really, really cool.

I agree, the C&C installers are very impressive and immersive. I actually enjoyed waiting for those games to install, which I can't say about most others.

- elias

It's definitely a function of length, I think...

IIRC, Freedom Force shows you cute little comicbook pages while installing. This is much less boring than staring at a progress bar through the whole thing (it takes a while, after all).

On the bad side, there was a game that asked you if you wanted to play music during setup and warned you that it would cause problems if your machine was slow/low memory. now, said game was several years old and I was reinstalling it for kicks on a MUCH faster machine than it needed (with plenty of memory) so I thought surely the music would work... but no. Horrible garbled scratchy jerky sound. And no way to turn it OFF once the install had started. (And a really ugly textured background to stare at.)

If the game is going to take several minutes to install, a bit of entertainment is nice, but make sure it WORKS! :)

If the game is going to take several minutes to install, a bit of entertainment is nice, but make sure it WORKS!

A small game perhaps ? :)


No a standard install will do. No music, no animation, no nothing...

I use Nullsoft's NSIS. It's pretty powerful, scriptable, and it's as clean as you want to make it... oh, and FREE! I think you can even do silent installs with it.

Personally, I think if your installer will take a long time to install your app (and if you're using ESD, it probably doesn't take that long to install), then a nice entertaining installer is a plus (ala CnC). But most downloadable apps install in mere seconds -- not enough time to justify taking away from the end-user's life. :) My screensaver installs practically instantaneously, so I personally couldn't justify any fancy installer GUI. Even if it took a bit longer, I don't think it'd be worth it. But if it took, say, a couple of minutes, it wouldn't be a bad idea at all to flash pretty pictures up, or to introduce the user to the application in some way.

Now if your app is the sort that someone would expect to be complicated enough to require a primer or tutorial, then perhaps the installation process is as good as any point to introduce the user to the workings of your app. Just be sure it doesn't *require* too much interaction though, because users who already know how the apps works and are just re-installing it would get very annoyed at having to go through a bunch of motions just to get the thing installed.

Anyone use Zone Alarm? It has a passive quick introduction thing after setup. Experienced users can just click past it (unforuntately no skip button, but it's only a few screens). I think that would work nice if the installer has the same look as the tutorial screen.

Before I said animation would be excluded, but with plugins it would still be possible of course... I actually came up with a few scenarios where animation would be fun or cute instead of annoying. Let's pretend princec's AlienFlux is actually a larger game that takes some time to install. Fluffies walking around in a window, acting as if they are interacting (stopping to talk to each other for example) would be a fun little 12 hour coding project. Right away the user would have an experience with the fluffies (and to stretch this a bit further, maybe even have had time to develop some attachment to them) before even starting the actual game. Sometimes its nice to blow off some coding steam and create something that isn't the best use of your time (MS Office has built-in pinball).

Another idea, more geared towards commerical games and not related to my proposed installer, but has anyone seen a retail that launches the intro sequence WHILE installing? Assuming this is made optional, I think it could be a very good way of letting the player do something they want (especially when the game has awesome little movies like Diablo II) and sort of cheating by skipping the install experience. 2 minute intro is done and oh look, so is the install. On slower machines maybe have little jokes or easter eggs if the intro finishes before the install.

Originally posted by Gmicek
Maybe it's because I'm approaching it from the view of just a gamer, nothing else. Not a techie and not a developer. I understand that the point of the installer is to get it running on your machine as quickly as possible, but as a gamer I want the whole experience.

I'm oldschool in the sense that the game playing experience begins when i first crack open the box (or go to the website). Installing is just another step in the whole game experience. All too often I download a game from a bland looking website and stare at a default windows looking installer as I wait for what I hope is a good game to load up.
I totally agree.

If you really want to see this concept done right, go to Disneyland. The experience begins even before you park your car, and continues to intensify throughout your day at the theme park. They work very hard to use layout, architecture, music, and landscaping to present a visceral experience to the guest at all times.

When you are waiting in line for an attraction, there are themed distractors to help you pass the time. The Jungle Cruise has antique images of 19th century explorers and their equipment, the Haunted Mansion has gargoyles and funny tombstone inscriptions, Star Tours uses C3PO and fake "commercials" for tour packages to other planets in the Star Wars galaxy. In most of the lines, the distractors increase in intensity as you approach the end so that at the moment you would otherwise be most frustrated at the wait, you have instead become the most excited about the experience you are anticipating.

Did they have to do all that stuff? Of course not. The rides would still be fun without the surrounding decorations. But going the extra mile is what makes the place Disneyland.