Custom JS Games, FastAPI Lorebot & Azure Stack — Balancing Heavy Assets with a SaaS-like UI

Design & UX
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Hey everyone! :slight_smile:

Long-time reader, first-time poster here. I’ve been building an independent ecommerce/web project rooted in a strict retro-futuristic minimalist philosophy. I just wrapped up the first stable build, and I’d love some brutal peer review on the architecture from this community.

Just to be clear up front: I am not selling anything here. I am strictly offering curious devs a chance to test my vault environment and give honest technical feedback.

The front-end bypasses standard bloated templates. I built a heavily customized child theme designed to navigate like a frictionless SaaS application. The core challenge has been balancing very heavy visual assets (curated 8K digital art + other products) with a zero-bounce, mobile-first design.

To push the retro-futurist vibe, I’ve also embedded a custom web arcade directly into the portal. The current stack features:

  • Custom Canvas Engine: 3 distinct JS physics arcade games tied together with a working hash handshake global leaderboard.

  • Production Uplink: Running/hosting on an Azure stack, utilizing FastAPI and Pydantic request bodies for strict data validation.

  • AI “Lorebot”: Powered by AsyncAzureOpenAI, routing through /api/lore and /api/physics endpoints with distinct system prompts.

Some examples screenshots:

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To monitor server load and gather structured feedback on the asset pipeline, the core testing environment is currently locked down.

If you are interested in poking around the architecture, breaking the JS physics engine, trying to trick the FastAPI lorebot, or profiling the UI, drop me a DM or shoot me an email at contact@ragnarcraft.com and I will generate a temporary Vault Access Key for you.

I’m specifically hunting for feedback on:

  1. Mobile & Cross-Browser Edge Cases: I am chasing down a responsive quirk with the canvas “stick” controls specifically on macOS Safari and MacBook Airs. If anyone on that hardware can test the layout, it would be a massive help.

  2. Asset Loading vs. Theme Performance: How does the UI handle the high-resolution art on your connection?

  3. Latency & Logic: How do the JS canvas loops feel, and does the hash handshake for the leaderboard hold up under your testing?

I appreciate any performance profiling, bug hunting, or UX critiques you can throw my way!

BR from Germany,
Ragner

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Balancing custom JS games with a FastAPI backend and Azure stack sounds powerful, but also pretty complex when you start dealing with heavy assets and UI performance. I like the SaaS-style approach since it keeps things scalable and clean.

1 Like
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Thanks for the feedback, johnduncan875o! I appreciate the perspective.

It is definitely a balancing act—to clarify the architecture slightly, the JS canvas engine is running as a raw, non-dependent engine on the front end to keep that interaction crisp. The FastAPI backend and AI engineering are currently dedicated to the /api/lore and /api/physics endpoints and the backend orchestration.

I have some ideas about scaling up to more complex, global ASCII-brutalist leaderboards for the arcade side, but I’m keeping it disciplined and taking it one step at a time to ensure the core performance remains stable before expanding the scope.
One friend even suggested to go headless with “ascii brutalist games” and have fun on Steam in future :smiley:

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This project combines custom JavaScript games, a FastAPI-powered Lorebot, and Azure services to deliver an interactive, scalable experience. The focus is on optimizing heavy game assets while maintaining a fast, responsive SaaS-style user interface. Efficient asset loading and cloud infrastructure help ensure smooth performance across devices.