Our latest bi-monthly W3C Games Community Group meetup was held online on November 30th, and this time we had the author of Roadroller (the js13kGames 2021 hit), Kang Seonghoon, talk about his heavyweight JavaScript packer.

This year’s js13kGames competition was jokingly dubbed “js15kGames”, because with Roadroller you were able to shave at least 1-2 kilobytes off of any regular zip that was minified and packed with all the best tools folks were using over the past years, and that’s A LOT. So much, that at least 35 entries were using it - including Dominic Szablewski, the author of Q1K3, who said he was able to add a whole second level to his game all thanks to the extra space Roadroller has offered.

Kang Seonghoon has given a short talk about Roadroller, and then we spent the rest of the time asking questions and getting really interesting answers about compression in general, the tool itself, its origin and the plans for the future. I’m curious if Kang will be able to participate in the 2022 edition of the competition, or will focus on improving Roadroller for other devs submitting their entries - apparently there might still be some room for about 1 kb more on top of what the tool was offering this year already.

Anyway, if you’d like to learn more about it, make sure to check Roadroller Postmortem blog post on the js13kGames Medium blog!