How to Stop Game Assets From Bloating Your Git Repository

A repo that takes ten minutes to clone is usually full of binary game assets Git was never built to diff. Here is how to get it back under control.

How to fix it

1. Track binaries with Git LFS

Install Git LFS and add patterns like *.png, *.wav, *.fbx, and *.mp4 to .gitattributes so new assets are stored as pointers, not full blobs.

2. Purge the history

Use git filter-repo to strip the already-committed binaries from past commits, then force-push and have the team re-clone to shrink everyone's copy.

3. Guard it going forward

Add a pre-commit or server-side hook that rejects new binaries over a size threshold that are not LFS-tracked, so the repo cannot quietly bloat again.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.