Overview

MechaHamster uses Firebase Cloud Messaging to receive messages from the publisher of the app. (You!) Notifications show up on the alert bar of any phone with Firebase, and when clicked, launch MechaHamster, and provide it with a custom payload of data.

In MechaHamster, these are used to send new maps to the player, after the app has been launched. Notifications add a new entry to the player's bonus_maps field in the Firebase Realtime Database, which allow them to access new maps.

Code Locations

Notifications are handled via a listener in the Main Menu state, (Assets/Hamster/Scripts/States/MainMenu.cs). The listener is registered whenever the MainMenu state is active, and unregistered whenever it is exited or suspended. Since the listener will fire if there is a pending event (that fired while there was no listener) this ensures that notification events are only handled while the game is in a state that is prepared to deal with it. (The main menu, in MechaHamster's case.)

Viewing in the Console

From the Firebase Console, select your Firebase project, and click "Notifications" from the menu on the left. This gives you a list of any notifications that have been sent, and gives you the option to duplicate them and resend existing ones without resending the same data.

To send a notification for MechaHamster, make sure to give it the following custom data fields:

Field name	Data
`type`	`bonus_map`
`map_id`	A bonus map ID
`map_name`	The name for the map to appear in menu

The value for map_id needs to be the map_id for an entry in the Firebase Realtime Database table "Bonus Maps". The easiest way to populate this table is to run MechaHamster through the Unity editor, launch the level editor, and save a map using the developer button "Bonus Map". (Only visible while running through the editor - this is a debug button intended to make it easy to author bonus maps.)

If type is anything other than bonus_map, then the notification will still be received, but MechaHamster will throw it out because it won't know how to parse the data.

(See Assets\Hamster\Scripts\States\MessageReceived.cs for the message handling code.)