Hey there!
I'm working on a pixel art game and trying to figure out a way to use Spine in our player character animation pipeline that allows for modular animation and easy previewing of all possible character customization combinations for us artists.
We are working in Game Maker.
Because our game is pixel-perfect we aren't using Spine entirely as intended... The bones are only ever being transformed (to perfect pixel positions), never scaled, and, if rotated, only at 90 degree angles. A lot of the animation is done by swapping in and out frames/character pieces, so our project will have a large number of images attached to each slot.
^ Sample of how I've been setting up some stuff in my project... things are going to get intense very quickly!
Our modular animation needs are something like mix and matching idle, walk and run cycles on the body with several different arm states/animations (e.g., arms down, picking up an item, holding arms up, throwing item.)
[I think I might have figured out how this works with "Tracks", see bottom of the post]
I figured the most obvious way to do this is to duplicate the idle, walk, and run animations, and make variants of each for each arm position. However, I dislike the redundancy and, in the case of the body, having to maintain the same thing in multiple places.
What I ended up trying is having just one "walk S" animation, setting up two kinds of arms to behave correctly in that one animation, and then manually toggling the visibility of the "Arms Up" and "Arms Down" slots to see how this actually looks:
I think this method might get overly complicated with more arm positions, but it works alright in this case. However, in the animation preview window I am seeing all arm positions at once, which is going to be unhelpful in the future when previewing animations to make sure new skins work as intended.
I think what I'd really like is for the arms to be able to have their own animation states that are independent from the body's animation states, and hook onto a bone/attachment point on the body.
Not sure if anything like that is possible in Spine, but please let me know if there's a better way to set any of this up!
[Would still appreciate advice RE: setting up skins]
Apart from that, I'm having some difficulties setting up skins.
Because so much of skin setup involves dragging files onto slots and the needs of this project necessitate a large number of attachments (might end up with hundreds between all the layers/body parts), the drag and drop workflow for adding new skins is pretty tedious.
This is made worse by the fact that all of the setup happens in the tree panel, and there's no ability that I'm aware of to open several tree panels at once, so even in my simple test project I was already constantly losing my spot and making mistakes.
Is there any way to automate the addition of new skins, given strict adhesion to a naming convention?
Thanks in advance, and sorry for the wall of text!
Aah I think I figured out the modular arm/body combo thing, using Tracks. I wish I figured it out before my mega-post.
This is promising, I'll have to see how it works in GM!
