Originally published on indiecore.net .

Part 9 of 10 on building a word-block puzzle engine. Part 8: pricing an economy off its difficulty model.

A word puzzle with 392 levels of JSON in it was a 17 MB App Bundle. That felt like the levels'

fault. It was not — content was 16% of the download and the Android runtime was most of the rest.

After the pass below, a phone downloads 5.88 MB where it used to download 13.09 MB . Here

is where it went, in order of how much it was worth.

First: stop reading the wrong number

ls -l on the .aab is not the download. Play splits a bundle per device — by screen density,

by ABI, by language — and strips its own metadata before delivery.…