Flaky Not Flaky — Con Weekend Bingo

Flaky Not Flaky is a family bake shop in a downtown Atlanta food court. For Dragon Con weekend they wanted a game that would pull convention crowds to the counter: a 25-square scavenger hunt dressed in a retro-futurist wasteland theme, with prizes redeemed in pastry.

The catch was the venue. The game is played in a food-court sub-level on convention wifi, so offline is the normal case, not the edge case. The design prototype pulled React, Babel, fonts and an icon webfont from CDNs at runtime: five network round-trips before a single pixel.

I ported the prototype into a real Vite + React PWA and removed every runtime network dependency.

• Offline after one load. Self-hosted font subsets (~91 KB), icons tree-shaken to the ~28 glyphs used, and a precaching service worker. Art went from 7.2 MB of PNG to 0.84 MB of WebP.
• Four set pieces. A password-deduction terminal, a first-person raycaster over the food-court blueprint (with a headless test that walks it), a hold-to-open whack-a-mole, and an eight-phase blackout sequence that still resolves under reduced motion.
• Shareable merit cards. Six 1080x1350 images composed on canvas, delivered through Web Share, then download, then press-and-hold as a fallback that cannot fail.
• No accounts. Progress lives in one localStorage key, with transfer codes to move a card between phones.
• Print pieces. A Python/OpenCV compositor places the meal box into location plates with colour matching and ground shadows, which produced the poster set.

Designing for the real environment instead of the demo. The constraints (bad wifi, iOS share quirks, a QR code that has to outlive any deploy) drove the architecture. It also shows I can carry a small client from concept to a live event: app, print, and the unglamorous checks, like an asset-integrity script that pins one image to exact pixel dimensions because the minigame crops it by coordinate.