Final Week

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 The movie class is pygame painfully outdated and the entire internet seems to agree that it's awful.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.

Additionally, Github is awful at merging files and branches and has basically locked me out of my own repository until I commit files it won't let me commit. I realize it's just trying to make it so I don't lose my work, but I've backed up my work, now just let me into the master branch! This is why I intend to continue using Tortoise SVN for the foreseeable future.