Spriter 2D sprite animation character design software features.

Create rotated, flipped and scaled clones of entire animations

Spriter Pro

Free

Animate with bones or by controlling images directly

Basic easing features

Onion skinning to see previous and up-coming key-frames

Basic IK (inverse kinematics) support

Trigger and preview sound effects at any point in the timeline

Lip-sync via Papagayo

Export animations as PNG images, strips, sheets or Gif Animations

Automatically import sequential images as animated sprites

Create named action points per frame and set their angle

Set “animated” variables for your character anywhere in the timeline

Create “Triggers” anywhere in the timeline to initiate actions in-game

Set “Tags” to any part of the timeline to designate “state changes”

Create character variations by swapping image sets (Character maps)

Use animations within animations to make complex scenes easily

Merge separate Spriter projects into one (Great for teams making games)

Deformable sprites (image warping) COMING SOON

Spriter enables the “modular” method of animating where frames are constructed from many small, re-useable images (such as body parts). This method of animating offers many benefits for several aspects of a game’s development and for the finished product:

• Time! Because an artist will be reusing a handful of modular images to create all of the frames for a character or effect, there will be much less time spent tweaking and polishing. • Iteration! Let’s say it becomes necessary to change an otherwise finished character’s head design. Instead of the huge task of redrawing or editing the head in every single frame of full frame animations, the artist would only need to change the handful of the head images that are used across all frames, turning a huge task into a quick and painless one. • Tweaking... Because the modular images (body parts) can be freely nudged around or rotated, it becomes much easier for a non-artist to make tweaks that might be necessary for gameplay, and very easy for the artist to go and re-address whatever tweaks the designer needed to make. • Character variations! Not only does this method allow for super fast and painless creation of alternate characters based on the data of another character, it also allows for an extremely time and memory efficient way of creating all the variations of a character which can change throughout a game (such as collecting powerups and new equipment). • Huge savings of file and heap space. Instead of each frame of animation being a large complete image, it’s simply a tiny amount of data storing the position, rotation etc of each small and re-used “body part” image. The larger and more robustly animated your characters and effects, the greater the savings will be.