I've been working on a fan site for Killer Bean lately and figured I'd share some of the more interesting implementation details, especially if you're building game hubs or wiki-style sites.
The biggest challenge was rendering firearm stats in a way that actually helps players compare loadouts. Most shooter wikis just dump numbers into tables, but Killer Bean's weapon pool has weird modifiers — some guns have "bean-seeking bullet physics" that aren't reflected in base DPS values. So I ended up building a quick data layer that pulls from in-game testing data spreadsheets and renders them as visual stat bars with conditional tooltips explaining the hidden mechanics.
For the mission guides, I ditched the traditional walkthrough format and went with a decision-tree component. Each boss fight section dynamically loads tips based on which weapon loadout you clicked earlier, since strategies diverge hard depending on whether you're running the Dual Wield Deagles or the Explosive Burrito Launcher. The state management for that got messier than expected — definitely underestimated how many branching paths there are.
A few things that worked surprisingly well:
- SVG bean sprites for the weapon icons. Way lighter than PNG spritesheets when you're rendering 40+ guns on a single page, and they scale perfectly on mobile without looking blurry.
- Client-side search with fuse.js for the enemy database. Players wanted to quickly look up weak points mid-mission, so every millisecond counts. The fuzzy matching handles typos like "clmbot" instead of "climbot" which happens more than you'd think.
- Lazy loading the gameplay GIFs. Some of those combo demonstrations are like 8MB apiece and were tanking the LCP score.
The whole thing's statically generated (Next.js) and hosted on a $5 VPS. I wrote up a more detailed breakdown over at [my blog URL] if anyone wants to see the actual component code and data schema — happy to share the repo too.
The localization part was actually the biggest headache. Extracting all the item descriptions and quips from the game files into a workable translation pipeline took way longer than the frontend work. If anyone's tackled game data extraction for fan projects, I'd love to hear how you approached the parsing logic — still feels hacky on my end.
