P-Driva, I'd love to see what you might do with Spine.
I'm almost positive I'll be tearing into it, myself. Just not yet.
I need to check on Spriter (http://www.brashmonkey.com/spriter.htm) again. (good god what an awful website)
Spriter is only $25, but Spine seems like a better product. Much more expensive, yes. But I don't care. I'll pay OUT THE NOSE for anything that helps me with development.
So . . .
Brashmonkey's Spriter -VS- Esoteric Software's Spine
Which is better? Am I the only one wondering this?
Both have the same goals. They seem to fill the same niche. Are they redundant?
*Mathias then does some internet snooping, using his powers of analysis and reason.*
Both were kickstarter projects, but get this:
Spriter was fully funded (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/539087245/spriter) on April 28, 2012. The people of earth coughed up $71,179 for Brashmoney.
AND YET
"Spriter is still in development and does not yet have all of its Pro features. This Early Adopter Sale price is a discount for those who purchase Spriter Pro before version 1.0. Estimated delivery date of the full version of Spriter Pro is Q4 of 2013." [source] (http://www.brashmonkey.com/buy_spriter.htm) (Ha! Way to keep your site up to date!)
The Kickstarter campaign was 21 months ago.
Spriter is pretty much still in beta.
What's the hold-up, fellas? Bite off more than you can chew, perchance? (I'm not sympathetic towards Kickstarter abuse.)
--
Now let's look at Spine's history:
Kickstarter campaign funded on Feb 23, 2013 (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/esotericsoftware/spine)
They got $67,569. $3,610 less than Brashmonkey.
It's been 11 months.
And it's lookin' good. Earlier in this thread I mentioned Spine getting "mesh deformation" soon. Well guess what?
The Spine dev's call it FFD - FreeForm Deformation. --- COMPANY BLOG ENTRY (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine/ffd-now-available/) --- FORUM POST (http://www.esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1936) --- and it's in!
I discovered the origin of Spine; what prompted its development. Check this out. Found on their Kickstarter campaign page:
"BrashMonkey's Spriter began development 15 months ago. We were initially thrilled when Spriter was funded on Kickstarter 9 months ago. We posted our feedback on the Spriter forums when we found it lacked official runtimes, a multiple-timeline dopesheet, tweening curves, and separate keying of scale, rotation, and translation. After a couple months we decided that Spriter may never have the features and workflow we envisioned, and that is when we decided to build Spine."
In my opinion, this paints the Spine dev's as smart, opportunistic, self-driven entrepreneurs.
They saw an opportunity and they seized it. Basically, Spine is intended as a BETTER Spriter.
Check out their pricing structure. (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-purchase/) Indy guys like us will drop $60-$250USD for Spine. Appears to be well worth it.
Draw your own conclusion. I've certainly drawn mine.
BUT WAIT . . .
A Challenger Approaches!
DragonBones (http://dragonbones.github.io/)
"The Open Source 2D skeleton animation solution for Flash"
I was once proficient with Flash. Once. Now very rusty. But bones in Flash would rock. That's obvious.
And it outputs game code, like Spriter and Spine.
Aaaaaand it's totally free.
So, that's something.
--
OH hold on, we got one more here. (wrote this post progressively as I discovered all this junk so bear with me . . .)
Objecty (http://www.skn3.com/apps/objecty)
"Objecty has been invented to make 2d game development easier! It offers an incredibly easy to use interface for editing & packing textures, animation of 2d sprites, creation of skeletal & tweened animations, building levels and much more!"
The Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skn3/objecty-2d-game-development-made-easier), back in December 2012 failed rather miserably.
Latest news update, on the company site, is from Oct 2011. The project appears inactive.
So forget about this one.
--
CONCLUSION
I know this thread isn't about software necessarily, but this post certainly is.
A few years ago, the notion of game dev modular animation tools became a phenomenon.
There were a few earnest attempts.
I'd say, right now, Spine is the clear winner.