A really interesting 28-minute video by daivuk about making a first-person shooter game QUOD that fit in just 64 kilobytes:

I found watching it strangely enthralling and even nerve racking. The creator keeps adding stuff that seemingly has no chance of fitting into such a small space – textures! sounds effects! music! his own language! – and somehow finds a way to squeeze them all in.

This is inspiring, but also practically useful: even though you and I are maybe never likely to need such high optimization, some of these techniques alone could be useful in some tight quarters like a load-bearing CSS file, or embedded software.

As an example, the author wrote his own “music tracker,” which is a clever way to reduce the weight of music: instead of the tune being one big audio file, only the instruments are sampled, and then arranged in repeating patterns.

Except in his case, there were no instruments… just audio effects already existing in the game. And audio effects themselves were generated in a similar way, by combining smaller waves and effects.

The same was done for textures: the creator wrote a bespoke text editor that saves each texture as smaller pieces and combination instructions – a sort of a “PDF” of a texture rather than a more costly scan of the printed page – and re-generates it on entry.

Lastly, this debug view of “cost” was really interesting. (Good debug views, in my opinion, are generally underrated.)