Experimenting with Spine

One of the things I have learned is that pixel art is time-consuming, animating pixel art even more so, and iterating on your animated designs is soul-crushingly time-consuming.

As I experiment with different movement and gameplay mechanics for my player, the need for continuously revised and expanded movement sets keeps growing. If I am not going to drown in a pixel art backlog, I feel I need something I can iterate on faster, at least for now. It does not have to be perfect, or even look great—just something to help get the feel of the necessary animations.

Spine 2D is a bone-based animation tool that lets you create 2D puppets and animate them. Working out how to approach building my puppet and getting it working has taken most of this evening, and it is still only half done. I am hoping that once I get the hang of it, I will be able to churn out animation much faster than the current handmade pixel art. I can then focus on evolving the gameplay, and once the movement set and game theme are more stable, I can look at replacing the puppet with lovely pixel art.

That is the plan, in any case—let’s see how it goes.