Any-Language Word Guessing Game

Changes in and notes for the GiellaLT fork

Changes

• the fork is a template repo, to be used with gut to generate new repos for new languages
• there are a few changes in scr/constants/config.ts to give it suitable defaults for our infra

Notes

The repo requires a new version of Node. Use nvm to ensure you have the correct node version active:

nvm use node

This repo uses husky to set up precommit hooks for git. To install it, run the following:

npm install --save-dev husky

If you get an error message saying that .husky/_/husky.sh is missing, run this:

npx husky install

To make sure that the tools needed by husky are available for Git Tower or other GUI git clients to run the pre-commit hook, do:

echo $PATH

Copy the output and define the environment variable PATH in Tower > Settings… > Environment. Paste the above output as the value for the variable.

Changes in upstream fork

I've adapted this code to allow for simply adapting it to another language. The wordlist and orthography (writing system) here are for the Gitksan language, but this repository is meant to be adapted to other languages. I've also added a script for publishing on GitHub Pages.

Summary of changes

• Allow letters in the "orthography.ts" to be digraphs or multigraphs (letters that are more than one character)
• Allow more or less atempts than 6
• Allow the length of words to be more or less than 5
• Added a configuration file to define language-specific metadata
• Added functionality for free deployment to GitHub Pages
• Dynamically render the keyboard based on the defined orthography
• Use Unicode normalization by default
• Use BC Sans open source font to better render Indigenous language orthographies in BC, Canada. See the blog to change the font
• Complete localization/translateability of the interface using react-i18next

To adapt for your language (the basics):

1. Change the file in src/constants/orthography.ts to use your language's writing system.
2. Change the file in src/constants/wordlist.ts to use your language's words.
3. Change the file in src/constants/validGuesses.ts to include all valid guesses for your language.
4. Change the file in src/constants/config.ts to include meta data about your language. If your language needs words longer or shorter than 5, you can set that in this file and also set the number of tries.
5. Publish on GitHub Pages by changing the homepage key in package.json and running npm run deploy or just committing to the main branch (and a GitHub workflow will take care of the rest).

For more information, including how to localize the interface to your language, visit the blog article: https://blog.mothertongues.org/word-guessing-game/.

The interface is translated by default in English, Kiswahili, Mandarin and Spanish - other translations are very welcome! To add translations please submit a pull request with the following steps:

1. Add an appropriate localiztion file in public/locales
2. Update the other localization files in public/locales to include the additional langauge
3. Update the CONFIG.availableLangs variable in src/constants/config.ts to include your language.

Thanks to Carolyn O'Meara (https://github.com/ckomeara) for providing the Spanish translation. Thanks to Haowen Jiang (https://github.com/howard-haowen) for providing the 中文 translation. Thanks to Benson Muite (https://github.com/bkmgit) for providing the Kiswahili translation.

To Run Locally: Clone the repository and perform the following command line actions:

$ cd anylanguage-word-guessing-game
$ npm install
$ npm run start

To build/run docker container:

$ docker build -t anylanguage-word-guessing-game .
$ docker run -d -p 3000:3000 anylanguage-word-guessing-game

open http://localhost:3000 in browser.