Hey guys, just wanted to drop in to spread the good word about a game development tool I've been writing with my good friend, Søren. I'm the programmer and he's the artist. The tool is called Spine and is used to build 2D skeletal animations specifically for games. We are doing a Kickstarter and passed our intial goal in just 3.5 days! We now have ~13 days left and we've just posted stretch goals, which include our plan for how to get Spine runtime support for almost all game toolkits.

You can see the Kickstarter here, and also a download link to try it now:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/esotericsoftware/spine

Hopefully you like our tool and can take advantage of the ~50% off you get by obtaining a license before the Kickstarter is over.

The dragon project was provided by ODI EntertaintmenT.

That looks really great. How effective do you find it at JRPG-style avatars, like this:

(from Heroes of Allacrost - which I'm not associated with)

@Servant of the Lord, Hi I'm the artist behind Spine so I just wanted to chime in and try to answer your question. There are multiple ways you can achieve that in Spine. For the image you linked, you could use a combination of switching images and tranforming bones. The benefit you get with that is that you can use procedural animation for it so you would be able to "blend" the best of both worlds.

One user of Spine has already done this. It's not a JRPG-style game he is doing, but it is the same principle. You can see it here.

Cheers!

Congrats on reaching your goal!