...or "Veelan" as Uncle Shrift would say.

One of my first reads preparing to design Carny was The Game's Brain, by Celia Hodent, who talked about how important a character's silhouette was.

It had to be instantly recognisable. I took her literally!

A strong silhouette communicates identity, gameplay role, and intention before the player can process details.

It needs to communicate its personality, how it moves and its mission.

In Carny, the player's avatar is a three-foot-nothing pest, wearing a skeleton suit. As cover. An intruder. A rodent that will stop at nothing to break into Crookwood, rob a grave and pinch body parts to build a monster, or what Carny calls a Stein.

A nod to Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein.

The Villain is a lot like Wile E. Coyote—not because Carny Island is anything like Road Runner, but because the Coyote never gave up. The Villain will go to Carny's blackmarket, Gweedo's, and buy all manner of decoys and devices to breach Crookwood's defences.

It has nine lives, so it just keeps coming back.

I made The Villain three feet tall because, when it enters Crookwood, everything looms larger. Everything towers over it.

When it stops to rob a grave, it is about the same size as the gravestone - which helps when framing up the game. The main camera - a 24mm wide - follows just behind the character and the UI is meant to feel part of it.

This helps the emotional belief when shouldering a weapon; I wanted the player to feel the weight the player is carrying is shouldered by the UI. In this sense, The Villain is the UI and the UI an extension of it. In other stages of the game, The Villain can collect a complex backpack called an MII which can produce a bulldozer-like arm and other wild contraptions. The UI then becomes part of the ghost train's kart.

I have designed The Villain so It could be any race, any age or any sex. I wanted the Villain to be an it, not a him or a her. The spiked hair gave me a strong silhouette which also casts a strong shadow.

Shadows are a big part of Carny. Shadows cast by moonlight. Shadows of gnarled trees. They all add to the horrorscape.

In many parts of the game, the Villain still presents as a shadow on the path.

Under a full moon, the skeleton suit can become quite luminous.

I already had Carnies—carnival workers, hence the game's name, Carny Island—wearing skeleton suits when working the ghost train, so the disguise made sense: The Villain thinks it can blend in amongst "the boners", sneak undercover and pillage. The Villainhas no face as such—just eyes peering from black sockets in the skull and a mouthful of crooked teeth.

Unity has a puppet. Its made from interlocking bones; characters are drawn over these bones and then the figure is animated.

I had already been thinking about putting the Villain into a skeleton suit, so the technology and the character met in the middle.

I asked Claude to draw me a reference sheet of the skeleton, with all the layers named. Then I drew three key views of The Villain in the skeleton suit: front, rear and side. Those views are used as the Villain changes direction. Then I drew another front, rear and side set for the Stein—the zombie monster the Villain begins to assemble from body parts stolen from graves.

As the player collects parts, the seventeen bones are replaced by seventeen limbs, plus six vital organs and a set of eyeballs. From the front and rear, you can see the organs plumbed together with green tubes. Excess parts go into the shopping trolley on the left of the interface. The shopping trolley is like a bottomless pit. You just chuck limbs and body parts into it.

Unfortunately, the more of the Stein you cobble together, the more blood trails you leave. In the snow, the cold may cauterise some of the bleeding. So you don't leave blood trails. As Carny Island is locked to NY weather, when you play is a tactic. If it snows in New York, it snows in Crookwood.

Carny Island is always best played at night, on a cold night. Calling these monsters Steins is a nod to Mary Shelley. Frankenstein is one of the greatest horror masterpieces of all time: a monster cobbled together from parts stolen from graves and then animated.

The most important thing is that the Villain has to be fun to move. The sneak is the primary move and it is a complex move. The stealth and the joy of its deceitful nature has to come through in the movement.

The closest walk we have made is still not right. It is too jerky. All the bones seem to move independently, as though they are not connected. It looks like a set of bones walking without personality.

I used old walk-cycle and sneak-cycle sheets from Richard Williams' expanded edition of The Animator's Survival Kit. Williams was the director of animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and his book is a manual of animation methods, principles and formulas. When I was a kid, I saw how Mickey Mouse was animated and copied those cycles.

I was never very good at hands and feet, but those methods have been extremely helpful in posing characters. There is something wonderfully ironic about animation guides developed through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s now being used to brief frontier AI models in the 2020s.

The Ken Harris slow-sneak drawing is a guide to weight, intention and timing; it is not artwork for us to reproduce in DINER. Our publishable artwork is my own Villain pose sheet. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

The recorded hierarchy is: root → hip → spine → chest → head; paired upper arms, lower arms and hands; and paired upper legs, lower legs and feet. The root sits on the ground between the feet and moves the whole Villain through the world. Separate spine and chest bones allow the ribcage to hunch over the pelvis for the sneak and duck.

A single torso bone would tend to make the body shrink rather than bend. Bone positions are derived from the artwork. The build uses rigid sprites parented directly to bones. It deliberately does not use mesh deformation or SpriteSkin for the character pieces. Each painted piece belongs entirely to one bone. That prevents a rigid painted femur or rib section from bending. Joint caps are art layers, not additional bones.

There are six principal directional character masters: Villain Puppet Front, Rear and Side; and Stein Puppet Front, Rear and Side. There is also a separate seventh PSD: the Stein Puppet Organ Chart. The directional masters are 3840 × 2160 with transparency. The side drawing can be mirrored for the opposite horizontal direction.

The art intake rule is one moving piece per layer. Hidden parts must be drawn completely because a limb swinging out from behind another part cannot reveal a missing section. Layer boundaries pass through the dark suit gap between rigid pieces, not through the painted bone itself. The renamed Unity intake copies remain separate so the original masters stay untouched.

The Claude build record matters because the failures did not arrive with clear errors. A PSD could import as ordinary sprites without a rig; the character-rig path used a renamed PSB copy. An obsolete Unity 2D IK package identifier caused installation trouble.

Animator curves targeting localEulerAnglesRaw resolved but did not rotate the bones, so the working implementation baked rotations to quaternion curves. Script-created SpriteSkin components did not return with reliable bone bindings, which reinforced the decision to parent rigid art directly to transforms.

Unity could suffix bone GameObject names when a sprite and bone shared a name, so structural detection was safer than exact-name lookup. Position curves had to be rest position plus offset. Sparse smoothed keys made planted feet slide. Counting unique rendered frame hashes exposed motion failures even when Unity reported no error.

The five structural poses recorded for a gait are CONTACT → LOW → PASSING → HIGH → CONTACT. Contact has the widest leg split with both feet on the ground. Low drops the weight onto the front leg. Passing brings the legs through one another as the support leg straightens. High is the push, with the body at its highest point.

The most useful production lesson was to render a numbered pose sheet before judging the video. A row of stills exposed narrow strides, floating feet, backward lean and weak amplitude more clearly than repeated playback.

The build tried to derive body height, stride and travel from the leg geometry rather than tune each independently, because travel that disagrees with stride creates foot sliding. Timing and personality remain Brett’s judgement: the mechanism can be measured, but the movement is not accepted until it feels like a three-foot person inside the suit.