I’ve started to reach some functional limitations using Spriter Pro and my character animations. It seems that every time I try to insert new sprites; namely, I want to add different faces for different clips, it does weird things. Like make my faces fly off.

So, in my quest to make things as best as I can, I was scanning the Game Development Resources list and came across Anima 2D. After a bit of reading and watching some tutorials, I decided to give it a try and see if I could get a bit more out of my admittedly basic player sprite.

I was thrilled that I could take my simple ‘stick-like’ arms and legs and bend them. I was even more thrilled that I could swap out sprites at runtime and change faces. I could add bones to the faces and animate those. I’ve always loved the blink I added, and now happy smiles and worried face are added in. Next will be a ‘Machinarium’ styled thinking, when the character idles too long.

Not to say it doesn’t have its difficulties. I’ve been trying to work out why my jump animation plays twice when he jumps. Or why it seems that FPS in animation doesn’t quite sync time-wise to actual game time. But, I am getting there – just got things working with adding the animation events for footsteps back in and left / right animations are next.