How we cut game update bandwidth by 94% building our own delta sync protocol
rust
dev.to
I'm building Raccreative Games, an indie game platform with a desktop launcher. Developers upload builds via a CLI tool called Clawdrop (Rust), and players download them through an Electron app. Early on, the update flow was simple and painful: developer changes two textures → uploads the entire 2.2 GB build → every player downloads 2.2 GB. The S3 egress bill didn't care that 98% of those bytes hadn't changed. I needed differential sync. What I ended up building is rac-delta, an open protocol