Building a comparison tool for two crash games: what the data layer taught me

Chicken Road Productions — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:51:12 +0000

I run a small independent publication covering crash games (18+ audience, educational angle — no betting on our side, ever). Last week I shipped a comparison tool for Chicken Road 1 vs Chicken Road 2, and the interesting part wasn't the UI. It was the data layer.

The problem

Comparing two games sounds trivial until you try to make the comparison honest. Each game exposes its parameters differently: difficulty levels, multiplier ladders, stated RTP. Put them side by side naively and you get a table that looks rigorous and means nothing — because the rows don't measure the same thing.

The architecture

The stack is deliberately boring: a static site (no backend), with the comparison logic in a single data module:

One normalized schema — every game gets reduced to the same fields: rtp, volatility, minBet, maxBet, difficultyLadders[], multiplierSteps[].
A mapping layer — the ugly part. Game A calls it "Easy/Medium/Hard", Game B uses numeric risk tiers. The mapper normalizes both into risk: 1..4.
A render layer — pure functions over the normalized schema. No game-specific code past the mapper.

The rule I enforced: if a field can't be sourced for both games, it doesn't go in the table. A comparison with asymmetric data is marketing, not information.

The failure

First version shipped with a bug that took me an embarrassing hour to find: the multiplier ladder for Game 2 was shifted by one step. The table showed Game 2 paying better at every level — which was wrong, and wrong in the direction that flatters the newer game. Root cause: Game 2's ladder starts at index 0 (a "safe" first step), Game 1's starts at index 1. My normalization assumed both started at 1.

I only caught it because I wrote a sanity assertion: ladder[0].risk <= ladder[1].risk for every game. It failed on Game 2 immediately. Lesson relearned: normalize before you compare, and assert your invariants — the most dangerous bugs in comparison tools are the ones that make the answer look plausible.

If you want to see the fixed result, the live Chicken Road 1 vs 2 comparator runs entirely on this normalized schema.

Hard numbers

Schema fields: 11 per game, 8 shared, 3 dropped for asymmetry.
Multiplier steps compared: 24 (Game 1) vs 25 (Game 2) — after index normalization.
Lines of mapping code: ~60. Lines of render code: ~200. The mapping is the whole product; the render is decoration.

What I'd do differently

Ship the schema as a standalone JSON file with a version number from day one. Right now the schema lives inside the page bundle; the next tool (an RTP simulator, in progress) will need the same normalized fields, and I'll be extracting it anyway. Boring infrastructure, decided late, costs twice.