<font color="red">Update 3/23/12:</font>
At long last, Spriter Beta Free Version Release to Scirra and Brashmonkey Board members this coming week! The price will be increase to a $25 beta version price at that time, so now is the last time to grab it at the current price (once all pro features are fully implemented, and it's been battled tested as stable, the final price will be announced and take effect). We wanted to give you one last warning of the price change, but if you can afford to wait, we'd prefer you to wait until next week's release as we will be starting a Kickstarter.com funding campaign on the same day as well, and a pledge of $25 or more will get you your pro version of Spriter, and help us reach are funding goal. Kickstarter is all or nothing crowdfunding. If we don't reach our pledge goal we get no funding, so we'll be needing all your help not only in the form of pledges, but also in spreading the word to any developers, animators, and even gamers who want to see more great looking 2d games coming out, especially if you're an active or well known member of a community or forum that specializes in one of these areas. Spriter won't just be a Construct and Construct 2 tool. The idea will be to get Spriter supported on every major gaming platform and engine. We will be doing some of this ourselves, and third party developing of extensions for other game engines has already begun as well.
We will be announcing Spriter's full feature set, as well as our potential future feature set if we get enough funding to take Spriter beyond it's current scope. A few of you might be pleasantly surprised and/or amazed at what's in the cards for Spriter. We've worked very hard over the past 6 months to make Spriter as awesome as possible, but there's still a bit to do to get it from beta to 1.0, from polishing the pro features, to fixing the bugs that will inevitably rear their ugly heads once hundreds or thousands of users get ahold of something. This process will be much quicker with a fully funded Spriter. Spriter's come very far from it's humble beginnings in November. I left my fulltime job to work on Spriter. I've been funding this development time out of pocket, and sacrificed 4 years off the end of my life with caffeine, because I believe in this project, and I think it's something developers have wanted for a long time, and not just us Scirrans. This is a labor of love, and I'd like to continue to respond to every "could you make it so when you press this it does that" with an immediate "YES!!" and for that we're going to need your help.
So get your trigger fingers ready to click on every like, favorite, and share button we can throw at you. We're putting the finishing touches on our Kickstarter video, and preparing the Kickstarter site with as much information as possible. Once again, the full Spriter feature set is supremely wonderous, but the feature set for what we can do if we go beyond our funding goal will blow your minds. Thank you everyone for your patience and support, and to those who have already purchased Spriter, worry not. Everything that has been promised will be delivered. The funding is to help get everything to you as quickly as possible, as well as everything you'll learn about next week. Thanks again everyone!
<font size="1">3/16/12:vid at the bottom of this post</font>
Update 3/11/12:
The beta for the free version is now complete, and in the hands of a small group of testers, so we can iron out any last minute bugs for the latest features, and address any last minute usability concerns that may arise. Over the coming week(s) we'll be updating our website, and getting together basic tutorials and videos to get you started, and then at last it will be released to the general public. Once again, a reminder the price will be increased upon this upcoming release. Now will be the last time to get Spriter at the super-low preorder price.
The development of the actual c2 plugin hasn't yet begun, and tweening is not fully supported by the editor as of yet, however preliminary testing with a proof of concept version of the C2 plugin seems to indicate that WebGL as handled by C2 is more than capable of handling many characters on screen with tweening enabled, animating smoothly in the browser! This also means of course this will work with exe wrapped games as well, as those features become available.
I will have a demo of this in-browser tweening as soon as possible, but suffice it to say - the smoothness and speed of the animation especially given the size of the sprites used, was very exciting.
The HTML5 canvas version of the display will most likely not be fast enough for tweening, but should be fine for frame by frame animations. You will be able to use the same animation file for both the tweened and non-tweened versions, and easily toggle tweening on and off versions in Spriter when tweening is fully integrated.
Stay tuned and bear with me a little longer, expect a flood of information, screenshots, and vids soon as we are gearing up for release.
Update 3/2/12:
The alpha of Spriter is now closed. Current users may continue using their current version, but we no longer require bug reports. The interface has been completely redesigned.
For those new to Spriter - It will be a tool for creating multisprite animations. It allows you to rapidly assemble characters from many images, and then either export them to .png sequences of frames, or better yet, load them into a Spriter plugin. Plugins load and manage the display of the images you used to create your character. This allows you to have very large, very smoothly moving characters, because you are reusing a set of small images, instead of a having one separate large image for each frame choking up your VRAM. Spriter has a wide feature set that will be outlined upon release.
The new version is a vast improvement on the alpha version from the last public video, and in the hands of testers. Expect more news soon. We are putting the finishing touches on the beta, and most likely the release candidate, of the editor and the Construct Classic plugin.
While non-classic users will still be able to export to png, and still take advantage of Spriter's superstreamlined interface - after initial release, top priority will be the development of the Construct 2 Plugin. Plugins for other engines are being pursued, Torque_2d being the most complete at this time, but there will be more news on that when those plugins approach completion.
<font size="2">here's a screenshot of the latest iteration</font>
<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/Spriter%20Releases/screen.png" border="0">
<font size="1">(right click - view image for full view)</font>
Even though the alpha is closed, you can still preorder Spriter at it's $5.99 price tag. The release price will be announced the day of release. The site can be used to preorder, but has yet to be updated with content from the next version. Preorders include the price of the C2 Plugin. When the plugin is complete it will be a small separate price, as will other exporters, this way you pay only for the exporters you need. The Construct Classic plugin will always be free. Also, there will be always be a free version of Spriter with a useful feature set. The updated differences in the Free and Pro version will be announced upon release.
Finally, again if you're new to Spriter, everything about the interface has been completely redesigned as you can see from the screenshot above, but
will give you a basic idea of the workflow.
we're very very close to release now. just wanted to release this little teaser vid before the big day comes:
having some fun with spriter:
runs much smoother when I'm not screenrecording:
watch in Original or 1080p please if your PC and Bandwidth can handle it: