2026-08-26 · 2 min read
34 MB of artwork to show it 78 pixels tall
The sprite strip at the bottom of the showcase weighed as much as an entire game. The problem wasn't how many images there were: it was that nobody had ever looked at how big they actually needed to be.
At the bottom of the showcase a strip scrolls past carrying the games' real artwork. It's the only place on the site where the illustration work is visible: Dark Cell has 1,879 images and for months the site showed not one of them.
The first version of that strip worked. It weighed 34 MB.
Thirty-four megabytes for one strip
Fourteen Dark Cell sprites, copied from the game's folder to the site's folder exactly as they were. Files meant to be drawn inside the game, at the resolution the game uses them.
On the site, that strip shows them 78 pixels tall.
Nobody had ever put those two facts side by side. There was no mistake anywhere: there was just a step — copy these files — that nobody had ever looked in the face.
Scaled to 156 pixels (double, for high-density screens) and converted to WebP, the same fourteen sprites weigh 1.3 MB in total. The strip looks identical.
And then there were the duplicates
Going through the files one by one turned up the second thing: infetto_base.png and 1000114019.png are the same drawing. Identical content, two names, two files.
It happens when an image comes from a different tool or gets renamed halfway through, and inside a game project it's normal: they're small and they bother nobody. On the site, though, we were publishing two copies and showing them twice in the same strip.
Deduplication doesn't look at names — names lie. It looks at the fingerprint of the content: two files with the same fingerprint are the same file, whatever they're called.
Why we didn't catch it sooner
Because the strip worked. It was visible, it scrolled, it looked good. A flaw that only ever shows up as "this page feels a bit slow" never raises its hand.
The only reason it surfaced is that somebody asked for the number: how much does this weigh? Thirty-four megabytes. To do what? Show some pictures 78 pixels tall.
Put that way the answer is obvious. The point is that nobody asks the question as long as a page opens.
What we take away
- A file inside the game and the same file inside the site are not the same thing, even when they are the same file. They serve two purposes and each needs preparing for its own.
- Copying is an operation, not an absence of one: "I'll just copy it" is the shape a decision takes when nobody makes it.
- Deduplicating by filename is an elegant way of not deduplicating.
