Reducing Package size

I’ve found quite a few topics about this but none so far have been able to help me out unfortunately.
I’m making a very simple visualization that I want to send to a client. It shows a very simple 3D model and has one blueprint in it. The data isn’t more than 5MB’s. However, upon packaging the project the packaged result is more than 200MB!

Not knowing if it was a content issue I’ve created a new blueprint based testgame without starter content and deleted the few items in the world, making it pitch black. I disabled all plugins except for the plugin manager itself, I ticked the “create compressed cooked packages” checkbox, disabled any irrelevant platforms, decreased the point lights from 4 to 1 and changed the packaging type from developer to shipping. The exported package size is still a massive 170MB’s. All the while the project folder size is only 18MB’s.

I highly doubt the base engine with it’s prime functions is so large. How else can mobile development be achieved? 170 or 200MB is unacceptable for a file to send to a client because as expected, he was rather put off by the large download for something so simple. I heard that the Tappy Chicken game is only 15MB so there must be something fundamental that I’m doing wrong.
Unfortunately I don’t posses the skills to modify the engine itself in C++ and disable functionality in there. That’s way beyond my league.

Does anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

Tappy chicken was done entirely in blueprints, you can actually download it, and take a look, may be you’ll find some clues. Search in Launchers Learn tab.

Thanks for your reply.
I can’t seem to find anything that they’ve done differently opposed to my test project. All the right checkboxes are ticked. Or so it seems. I’m starting to think they’ve tweaked some of the C++ source code in order to reduce this package size like switching things off which they could have done quickly without thinking about it or having it documented.

I just find it so odd that an empty project is around 170MB’s. If there was a difference of just a few MB’s then it wouldn’t bother me so much. But a finished game of 15MB compared to an empty one that is 155MB bigger indicates that something mayor is wrong with the package I exported.

When I look at the cook log it seems to be packing a lot of engine related content that I doubt should belong in a game such as Tutorials, primitive meshes and other stuff. There should be a way prevent this from cooking right?

One of the lines:

UATHelper: Packaging (HTML5): UE4Editor-Cmd: [2016.10.25-12.34.15:924][  0]LogCook:Display: Cooking /Engine/Tutorial/Foliage/Foliage_Settings_Tutorial -> C:/Users/Name/Documents/Unreal Projects/Sizetest/Saved/Cooked/HTML5/Engine/Content/Tutorial/Foliage/Foliage_Settings_Tutorial.

Please review this documentation, it is [Reducing APK Package Size][1]. While it is targeted for mobile development, the blacklisting feature is used on other platforms and will help pull out any files you plan on not using once packaged.

  • [Packaging Projects][2]
  • [Releasing Your Project][3]

Optimization Guides for Android in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation
[2]: Packaging Unreal Engine Projects | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation
[3]: Preparing Unreal Engine Projects for Release | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation

Isn’t this comment outdated now right? It seems it only cooks used assets automatically now.