I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience working with this project; technical difficulties and all. It was a great adventure working with a team focused on making this game come to light. I hope to have similarly fulfilling projects in the future!
Though the development was supposed to be only 4 weeks, what's happened in the past several days seems notable enough to write about. This week we had another couple meetings, figured out the exact design of how all the rooms connected to each other, and created our super special climactic cutscene in Adobe Premier. Personally, I also took the rest of the pictures we needed at my house, which included enlisting my mother as a makeup artist to make it look like I did drugs. There have been a lot of unfortunate/slightly sketchy Google searches for this project. Additionally, I wrote and recorded the rest of the dialogue for the notes and plugged it into the code (Tom put in dummy sounds for the notes already so it was super easy to just replace them with the right wav file). The main struggle this week though was working with getting the movie to play. After we (mostly Mohammad) made the movie video, I had to reincorporate the audio, which involved finding free video editing software that wasn't awful (harder than it sounds). After editing the video, it had to be converted to a very specific video format that no one has ever wanted, which greatly decreased the video quality, and then I actually had to get python to play it. The movie class is pygame painfully outdated and the entire internet seems to agree that it's awful. The standard way of getting it to play sound is to disable the mixer, but after that, it seemed impossible to reinitialize the mixer, so any call to it after that would cause the game to crash. I was halfway through rewriting the cutscene class to initialize the mixer and load sounds on entrance to the mode (a risky, and relatively resource-intensive process that didn't even appear to be working) when someone posted on my Facebook page a link to a code sample of someone using the mixer class to rip the audio from the movie and use it as an accompanying soundtrack.
This week was both productive and somewhat unfortunate. My phone got stolen and that got rid of all of the pictures we took last week. Fortunately, we were able to get everything done pretty quickly and since Mohammad was here this time, we were able to get some more props. I took all of the pictures we needed from Tom's house and we should be all set.
During week 4 we focused mainly on completing and fleshing out our game story as well as obtaining all of the resources (ie. pictures) needed. For this week I helped complete the game story as well as assisted with obtaining our content. I have also worked on our game design document.
Like Tom said, this week involved a lot of taking pictures and making sure we had the assets to the game. The progression to the first part of the game was hashed out and many, many pictures were taken.
In our third week of development, we focused on finishing up our engine framework and began to gather content and resources for our game. This week I mainly helped with obtaining pictures (my house being one of settings in the game) and generating the initial story progression of the game.
Like Tom said, this week focused on the technical aspects of the game. We all got together and worked on ways to make the engine more extensible and readable (particularly with rooms, like Victor mentioned) and I assigned those features to members of the team. My assignment for this week was to implement CSV reading of room data so that it could be changed easily and clearly outside of the code.
For our second week of development, we focused mainly on coding and enhancing the game engine's framework and foundation. I fixed a sound bug where sound continues to play when changing rooms. I also implemented a splash screen, main menu, pause screen, skippable cutscenes, and a framework for saving and loading via pickling (not working yet).
Slightly delayed blog post, but this week was very productive in terms of organization. We decided what features needed to be added (subtitles, a history log, an icon to replay the current note, game waiting until audio stops before progressing, and a main menu) and talked a lot about content. We decided on ways to communicate and how we want to set up code and what our roles are. The code hasn't been changed yet from the prototype, but I anticipate that changing next week.
Hello all!
This is from off the top of my head: