Wow, thanks everyone. This will hopefully help people in need. I was just wondering, because I though you probably would be able to quickly create sprites. I did some extra research and found this:
Spriter
It is a piece of software to create animations. It is very easy to use and works with key-frames, so hopefully, it will be useful for many. You basically have a timeline in which you can add transformations. For a simple, enlarging animation, you could start with a scale factor of 1 and add a keyframe after a second which had a scale factor of 2. What this will do is gradually increase the size of the sprite until it doubles at the end of the second. It can then be exported with as many frames as you want (you don´t have to do them individually!) Great help, seriously
1) You can scale and rotate sprites with almost any art program - you don't need to pay for more software that specializes in that.
2) This creates special files in a special format that you'll have to add programming support for in your game (or use the community-provided plugins available).
3) It's trying to sell itself, so it's optimistic about (and likely over-exaggerates) the benefits it actually provides.
4) This is paper-dolling and skeletal rigging - which is nice (and both were already mentioned), but doesn't solve the primary difficulty of animations.
5) If someone is trying to sell you a piece of software for $25 dollars that makes art so easy that "you don't even need to hire an artist", stop and ask yourself why everyone who runs businesses making games bothers to high artists anyway.
The primary difficulty in sprites is drawing the same object from different angles. No software can solve that problem. Observe:
Guy wearing hat
Guy no longer wearing hat - the software cannot re-draw the hat at a different angle.
An artist had already pre-created the human at different angles (the software didn't generate it either, afaik), but the hat, which was drawn during the video, wasn't pre-created, and thus has to be manually re-drawn at each unique camera angle.
Software can only rotate 2D images (that are pretend 3D objects) along the z axis, which has never been a problem for artists. It's when trying to rotate the 2D images along the x and y axes that require the 2D image to be redrawn by the artist and cannot be calculated by the computer (unless you 3D model the object, in which case you are rotating a 3D model and not a 2D image).
If I draw a basketball, it's a 2D image. If I asked a computer to re-draw it at a new angle, the computer doesn't know if the 2D image is a pretend 3D image, and if it is, whether it's a flat disc, a sphere, or any number of potential possibilities (maybe it's a round pillar that you're looking straight down on). You just can't create a 3D object from a 2D shape, unless you provide (model) the details of the 3D shape.
I'm not saying the software is useless (it looks very interesting, and would be useful in a number of situations), just that it probably isn't the silver bullet that you might think it is, and is only beneficial to certain types of games. You mentioned Limbo in terms of quality, if your game is also sidescrolling like Limbo is, then it might be a worth using! But you'll have to decide that for yourself (in conjunction with your artist), understanding the pros and cons, and understanding the programming cost as well, and recognizing that it still won't solve all the art problems.
Since there is a free version, try it out and see! Talk with your artist about it, and if it resolves even 20% of your workload, I'd say it's worth it. But it won't lesson it by 20% for every game project, only with certain ones.
