If you’re ready to take your first steps with Spine, let’s get started! Getting Startedįirst things first: you need to download and install Spine. Instead, the focus of this tutorial is using Spine itself, which will be useful no matter what game framework you may be using. Note that this tutorial does not cover integrating the resulting animations into a game that will be a separate tutorial. In this tutorial, you’ll use Spine to animate a clumsy elf so that it walks and trips. Spine also comes with a huge list of pre-made Spine runtimes, which is a fancy way of saying “code you can add into your game to read Spine files, and create animated sprites from them.” Runtimes include Unity, Sprite Kit, cocos2d-iPhone, and much more. Spine is a graphical interface that allows you to create a skeleton out of each pieces of your sprite, and move it around in order to create animations you can use in your game.
#SPINE2D CHARACTERS SOFTWARE#
Luckily, the folks at Esoteric Software have created a great tool to help you out called Spine. Of course, creating a 2D skeletal animation system by hand is a crazy amount of work. You also add some code into your game to read this animation file, create sprites for each body part, and move them around according to the instructions in the file.
#SPINE2D CHARACTERS HOW TO#
Then you create a small file that describes how to move the body parts around in order to perform the animation you want, such as walking, running, or jumping. The idea is instead of saving out each and every frame of animation, instead you save out individual body parts like this: The way to solve these problems is to integrate something called a 2D Skeletal Animation system into your games. Since each frame animation needs to be hand-drawn, if you are a developer this is probably something you need to rely on your artist to do – even if there’s a particular effect you’re going after.