At some point in the game you will meet Father Cassidy, who - believe it or not - will be a very important ally in your quest. Cassidy was one of our earliest characters, probably because we agreed very quickly that making an adventure game without it featuring at least one drunk, foul-mouthed priest would be a terrible waste.

Our artist Josef starts his work on most characters with a hand-drawn draft, but Cassidy is one of the few that was born as a pixel art sketch (at this time still known as Father Blutered):

Which, over time and a few iterations, turned into the final character sprite:

Using this sprite as a base, Josef creates every single frame for every possible animation we need from the character. We may not see Cassidy walk around in the game, so there's no need for a walk cycle animation, but that still leaves a LOT of angry rambling, celebrative burping, gulping down booze, sniffing back snot, and so on. All in all, Father Cassidy's animations are composed of around 80 single images.

Some of them come without the head, others without the body, so they can be combined to even more different frames and therefore longer, more varied animations.

After finishing up the frames, I import them into Adventure Game Studio and combine them to different sequences for talking, standing around, drinking from the mug, and the like.

Getting the timing right, tying the sequences to their corresponding situations and behaviours, and placing the sprite at its proper time and spot in the game world all involve a bit of number-tweaking as well as a little scripting magic. After that, Father Cassidy is ready for his appearance!

Cheers!
- Andi