Better.sg ToBeYou Game

ToBeYou is an interactive fiction game where players go through "life" as someone else, make life choices, discover hardships and dilemmas, and learn to empathise with the life journeys of people from different backgrounds.

Find out more at https://tobeyou.sg

Build and deployment

The site deploys to Firebase hosting. GitHub Actions have been set up for automated deployments.

When you create a PR, GitHub Actions will deploy the site to a preview URL.

When the PR is merged to main, GitHub Actions will deploy the staging site.

When release is updated, GitHub Actions will deploy the production site.

To make a release, you can raise a PR to merge main into release. (Lead dev can checkout release locally, merge in main, and then push directly.)

The preview, staging and production sites are all configured to use the same Firebase app. Auth, data storage, and other services are thus common across all environments.

Firebase Env

For the development server to work, Firebase must first be configured by setting up .env.

If you already have an .env file for an existing Firebase app, simply copy it to the root directory.

Otherwise, copy .env.example into a new .env file. Create a new Firebase project here. Add a new web application, then copy its Firebase configuration variables into .env.

• Under Authentication, navigate to "Sign-in method" and enable Email/Password, Google, and/or Facebook. These are needed for signing in.
• Under Firestore Database, navigate to "Rules" and edit them to enable reads and writes, e.g. by modifying it to allow read, write: if true; in line 5.

Once Firebase has been set up, set the following environment variables to their appropriate values from Firebase in an .env file:

• REACT_APP_FIREBASE_API_KEY
• REACT_APP_FIREBASE_AUTH_DOMAIN
• REACT_APP_FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID
• REACT_APP_FIREBASE_STORAGE_BUCKET
• REACT_APP_FIREBASE_MESSAGING_SENDER_ID
• REACT_APP_FIREBASE_APP_ID
• REACT_APP_FIREBASE_MEASUREMENT_ID

Setup

Run npm install to install the required dependencies, then run npm start to start the app on localhost:3000.

The game uses Inky (by Inklestudios) as the backend for the narrative engine, and a custom React front end.

Deploying Firebase Functions

Ensure that your version of firebase is at least 11.

To set up the environment variables for Firebase functions, create functions/.env and set the value for EMAILJS_ACCESS_TOKEN to be your EmailJS private key.

Deploy to Firebase with firebase deploy --only functions. When deploying, you should see in the console that the environment variables have been loaded from .env.

Community

This is a nonprofit volunteer-run project by better.sg.