The Zork Library Forum

I've been kicking around an idea for a graphic game I would like to produce.   I would like to get an opinion from any of you who have some experience with creating one.

I know of a place that is fairly well known (among ghost story fans) that is haunted - or so the belief goes.   Naturally, there is a pretty good story or history that goes along with the haunting.  Anyway, this place is going to be torn down in a couple of years.

Here's my plan:  I want to get permission for access to the premises.  I will map the place out and mark all the locations that I will need.  Then I will set my digital camera on a tripod and take pictures in all directions from each spot.  Or maybe I can take continous 360 shots from each location.  Anyone have experience with that?

This way, I could create the whole place on the computer with a minimum of effort (compared to computer generating the whole place.)  That would be a good starting point.   It won't be a true 3D world because it is based on photographs.  

How difficult would it be to add computer generated objects into the scenes?  Or do things like open drawers, doors etc.  Remember, I will be starting with actual photos and will have to add realistic looking renderings seemlessly onto them.  

One of the reasons I like this idea is because it will be based on a 'real' and fairly well-known ghost story.  Also, it will be a photo recreation of the actual location.   I think I could market this to the ghost hunter crowd (a larger group than you might think) even if they never played a graphic adventure game before.   Plus, it hopefully will have some appeal to the existing graphic adventure fan base.

Mostly what I'm asking is if it will be difficult to add things, after the fact, to the photos that I take and make them look like they belong there?

Well, the easiest (and most obvious) way would be to take short clips of every action you're going to allow, but that would require much more effort and you'd have to already have written the game before you even go in there.

Yeah.  The problem is that the game is not written at all, but I would like to get the location digitized while it is still standing.  

I was looking at a program called omnistitcher by Pixtra.  It is a program that creates a 360 x 360 (horizontal and sky to ground) panorama from a series of pictures taken from one point.

If I did this ghost game, it would be nice to use 360 x 360 panning.  I was wondering, did you guys find any commercially available game creation software that supports 360 or 360 x 360 panning?