DevLog: Canceled Haunted House Game
Making A Scary Grounds Keeper
The Concept
At one point, I really wanted to create a scary haunted house game where players would explore an abandoned Victorian mansion and try to exorcise ghosts! The player would need to use various tools to find and exorcise each ghost. While players would be attempting to deal with the ghosts, an angry groundskeeper would try to find them and throw them out of the house!
Initially I had this idea that the ghosts would hunt the player if the player was in the dark, or didn’t have their flashlight on, and that the groundskeeper would hunt the player if the player was in the light. Ultimately, the concept for the game was never fully fleshed out and I never completed the game.
However, there are plenty of things I made for the game that I am proud of. One is the process by which I brought the evil grumpy groundskeeper to life.
Initial Drawings
“Who goes there?” Croaked a wet, growling voice from somewhere in the dark, “Show yourself, you can’t hide from me.”
Rough, dry fingers fumbled through the pockets of a tattered overcoat for a match. The match was lit and brought to the base of a rusted oil lantern. The groundskeeper held the lantern aloft, the light illuminated his face to reveal skin that was thick and wrinkled; twisted and cracked like the knotted wood of an ancient oak. When he spoke, his crooked yellow teeth flashed behind a scraggy mustache while black drool slowly dribbled down through his beard.
“Begone,” he grumbled, “the house doesn’t want you.”
Modeling
Using blender, I modeled each piece of the groundskeeper one at a time, starting with the head, then moving onto the parts of the body. I knew I really wanted to maintain the angular, geometric style, and funky proportions of my drawings.
UV Mapping
This process was tricky, because I had never tried my hand at such a complicated object. But, I used Blender’s automated tools for identifying sharp edges, then used those as a guideline for which edges I wanted to mark a seams. Finally, I manually tweaked the UVs ever so slightly until I arrived at something that worked.
Texturing
I opted for hand-painting the textures in Procreate (I know, not the best program for this), in order to get the type of feel I wanted. I really wanted something that felt like a child scribbling out a terrifying crayon drawing - all those chaotic sketchy marks would help add to the grungy feeling of the word.
Animations
For animating the model, I simply went over to Mixamo.com and used their auto-rigging tool to rig him up. Then I downloaded the model + rig and did some very simple weight-painting to make sure the model moved the way I wanted it to. Finally, I downloaded the aniamtions from Mixamo I wanted to use.
In Unity, I used a 2D blend tree to manage the walking and running animations. One dimension was direction and the other was speed, so that turning animations would look right and so that the model would animate walking to running appropriately as it sped up its movement. I planned to have him idly walk around the map, then run towards the player once the player is spotted.
He moves around using Unity’s built in navmesh system and a little bit of scripting. I also wrote a quick script for player detection and speed adjustments as needed.
The Lantern
I modeled and old-style lantern in blender, and also hand-painted a texture for it. To have the groundskeeper hold the lantern, I made use of Unity’s Animation Rigging package. By adding a quick two-joint IK system using built-in components, and by “targeting” the hand to the top of the lantern, I was able to place the hand correctly. To achieve a closed hand, I found another animation on Mixamo with a closed hand. By creating another animation layer in the groundskeepers animator and then using a humanoid avatar mask for only the left hand, I could apply the animation for the closed left hand without compromising the rest of the animation.
This left me with two sliders to manipulate to change the behavior of the lantern-holding hand and arm: 1) adjusting the strength of the IK system to lift and lower the lantern. 2) adjusting the override of the left hand animation layer to open and close the hand.
Conclusion
And there’s our grumbly grimy groundskeeper!