In an effort the add an educational gameplay element to the interactive version of the project, I added newspapers strewn throughout the building. Newspapers from the Urbana Courier-Herald are available online at the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, and are fully searchable through the magic of OCR. I found several issues that deal with the opening of the school -- particularly the delay because of the fire. Even though the papers are searchable, I found myself reading entire issues because the history contained is fascinating.
Within the game, I set the newspapers to change once they are read, so the player always reads the issues in sequence. Approaching any newspaper in the building will display an option to read the paper, upon which the full-resolution page appears, and the applicable article zooms into focus. The player must extinguish the fire in the coal bunker in order to read the article about the school actually opening.
Going back to read these again, I saw a detail about how smoke was pouring out of the manhole covers over the coal bunker, so that necessitated adding smoke.
Getting the newspapers to change correctly took a lot of work, so I followed this up with something "fun:" the tower ghost. The ghost was not something originally on my list of tasks, but two developments encouraged me to add it.
First, a piece of free software exists called MakeHuman. This originally was an extension for Blender, but now is a stand-alone application. The program allows easy creation of fully modeled and rigged digital people. "Rigged" means that the model can immediately be animated. Body types, faces, clothes -- all are customization. I used the software to generate an appropriately spooky-looking lady with a long dress.
Second, the Carnegie Mellon University Motion Capture Database is available online, and the data has been converted to be compatible with Blender. Numerous videos on YouTube describe how to combine these animations in Blender with models created with MakeHuman to make game-ready assets. I found an animation of someone walking up stairs, and combined that with the woman I generated from MakeHuman.
Imported into UE4, the addition of some lighting, sound, fog, and a touch of post-processing makes the effect quite convincing (and legitimately frightening!). She appears in a special, random sequence. Rather than spoil the surprise, I will only post a still screenshot here.
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| Spooky! |
