A menu for Nils

Nils has always created physical devices to present Hanging Around, his RPGMaker-based videogame. Arcade stations, more specifically; the first one being installed at Grenoble’s School of Art; the second which is now at my place; and now a third one for an exhibition (above).

For the latter, Nils needed an interactive menu able to either launch the game, or launch some videos of projects he worked on. He designed an animated GIF to put in the background of the menu for the "old school" feeling.

I combined Python and VLC for making this. I used Pygame with which I already made two games (I may present them here some day), and I used a library named GIFImage that I quickly had to debug for getting the GIF to work. Finally I developed a crude windows installer (RPGMaker games only work on Windows).

Here are some issues I have had to resolve:

• how to prevent users from sending key sequences to VLC so as to block or change the video
• how to prevent users from quitting the menu
• how to install pygame under windows (hint: it fails via pip install)
• how to install silently python + vlc
• how to permanently add a directory to PATH from the command line
• how to programmatically create a .lnk shortcut in the start folder

And needless to say, the very classical issue related to Pygame: scaling image and text so that the proportions stay the same, whichever the screen resolution.

I still need to do some cleanup and I will put the code on github for others to use.

The arcade station is now live and well in the exhibition space.