5utd

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Creator of

To Be You

a Singapore-based interactive fiction game to encourage empathy and dialogue

5utd

Interactive Fiction

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To Be You jam comments · Posted in To Be You jam comments

5utd12 days ago

For those of you who remember, this was a game we worked on back in 2021-2022. I've revamped it significantly this weekend for the game jam. All the work has been specifically done over the weekend. AI assistance was limited to coding and debugging. This is one of the first local games which integrate interactive fiction with a live chat feature. Updates include-

Re-platformed the build from CRA and webpack 4 to Vite 5, React 18, MUI v6, and react-router v6, and made the game run fully offline. We removed the Firebase and auth dependency in favour of a localStorage shim, so it ships as a static build to itch.io.

Rebuilt the experience around a two-way empathy loop: a cold open, the short-form content-based fast-play, live no-good-option dilemmas with reactive meters, probing checkpoints and world-insights, in-character chat (Claude API, with offline scripted personas), an understanding score, a written reflection, and perspective-swap replays.

Reframed the 23 factual quizzes from a pass/fail test into a no-shame "guess, then see the reality" reveal, added cross-chapter consequence persistence, and instrumented chapters beyond chapter one.

Worked the jam theme "Turn up the heat" into a heat glow and a breaking-point beat tied to the mood meter.

Did accessibility, mobile and safe-area, and deployment work, and added a Labs flag to keep the experimental tools off the front door.

Video of playthrough - www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw_D_F6fd5E

Tech stack:

Build: Vite 5, migrated from CRA4/webpack4. React 18, MUI v6 (emotion plus tss-react), and react-router v6 on a HashRouter so routing survives itch's iframe and subpath.

Story engine: inkjs 2.4. Each character is src/stories/<name>.ink with a compiled .ink.json, registered in src/models/storyMap.js. InkController maps #ui: tags to screen components (scene, narrator, whatsapp, twitch, twitter, mcq, reflection, story_end, and so on).

Chat: Claude via @anthropic-ai/sdk (claude-opus-4-8, streaming), with offline scripted personas as the default. No API key is bundled. A player can paste their own through the in-app key panel.