Hello everyone, I just wanted to touch base with you on the current delay.

While troubleshooting the source of the bone slowdown bug, after finding it, even though things were significantly faster, I realized it's a good time to do some heavy optimization now that things are generally doing what they should, and start polishing things up to get out of alpha and into beta. Going by the forum posts, the most needed features right now are speed and stability. I'm in the middle of some heavy optimization and stability improvements. There should be a very significant boost in performance when this is done. Then we'll get those pro features built on top of this more solid base. Though this is causing a large delay in the current build, it still does not alter our full featured and stable ETA of late December. I will update you as I get a little closer to release. I apologize for the delay, but the result will be a very large step towards the polished finished product. Thanks for your patience everyone.

Hi Everyone,

This update pertains specifically to art-packs. So here's a message from Mike, BrashMonkey's resident artist and animator.

Greetings Kickstarters,

First off, my apologies for missing the estimated deliver date for our first art pack and thank you very much for your patience. The delay could not be helped, but the good news is it will ultimately lead to better and more robust art packs. I'll explain how in a second.

We'd made the right decision early on to invest the time to recreate Spriter from the ground up (with a more stable, cross platform foundation). This lead to an ultimately better product, accessible to many more people, but at the cost of a longer wait for some key features to be implemented. This also consequently had a bit of a delaying effect on the production of art packs...specifically the animating part. I could not really begin creating animations until Spriter was far enough along to properly support creating tweened animations and characters with bones.

Of course I kept busy during the development of Spriter to it's current, highly useable state I and several other artist I'd commissioned for help have spent quite a bit of time on pre-creating much of the required static art (body part images, effect images etc) that I'd later be animating. This lead to a greater variety of images than would have otherwise been the case if I had been able to just start animating right away to try and meet the estimated delivery date for the first art pack.

Since the release of build A4 of Spriter, I've been working on creating the actual animations for the first two art packs. That said, the actual animating process, as well as tweaking and perfecting the pre-created images to work best for all eventual animations is a big undertaking so they will not be ready over night. Our current plan is to try and have at least one, maybe two complete art packs ready for around the same release date as the Spriter Pro 1.0... roughly end of December or early January.

The first two art packs will be:

• Game Effects animated art pack. This art pack will be loaded with a huge assortment of assorted effects such as impact flashes, explosions, dust clouds, magic missiles, charge-up effects and more.
• Basic Platformer animated art pack. This art pack will feature a vast assortment of animations specifically for platformer games in the flavor if Mario, Warrio, Sonic etc. This pack will feature not only a large assortment of player animations such as walking, running, jumping, getting hit, checking balance at ledges etc, but will also contain an assortment of animated enemies, bosses and effects.

As a way of saying thank you to you Kickstarter backers who pledged 40 dollars or more, we'll be emailing you a link to download the latest (incomplete) version of both art packs as they develop starting less than two weeks from now. From that point on until they are both finished I'll be updating the files at least once a week. This will allow you to keep track of their progress, as well as begin using them to create your own custom art or just test your game engines with them sooner rather than later. Of course, they will be works in progress, unpolished and a bit disorganized, so use them with that in mind.

I would also like to announce that our first party commercial versions of the art packs will be packed with a wide range of content, but we will also be making “essential” versions of every art pack (featuring the most important core animations and art needed for animating games of those genres.) available to any Spriter Pro purchaser.

For those of you who did not pledge 40 dollars or over, but still pledged high enough to gain access to the private forums, I'll also be posting links in our private forums to the unfinished free “essential” versions of these art packs so you too can begin testing and animating with them (also starting in just under 2 weeks).

Thanks again everyone so much for your patience and support!

-Mike at BrashMonkey

Kickstarter won't allow me to edit my previous post, but a change and a clarification is necessary.  All backers who pledged $25 or more, and pre-orders before December 15th will own the full commercial license.  Also, the professional license and commercial licenses have identical feature sets.  The professional license is meant as a discount to indie developers, and we will change the name to the indie license to make this more clear.

Hello everyone, We wanted to give everyone a heads up about the impending Spriter price increase and a change in policy regarding Spriter official plugins.

Price Increase

Spriter 1.0 will be priced as follows:

Essential : Free - create animations with Spriter's basic features

• Position, scale and rotate any images in a frame.
• Vertically or horizontally flip any images in a frame.
• Set the opacity level for any images in a frame.
• Adjustable pivot points.
• Tweening support.
• Export finished animations in SCML for realtime playback or full frame sequential PNGs (with alpha channel).
• Basic onionskin mode for easier animating.
• Basic bone support
• Create multiple characters per file.

Professional : $75 - Indie and personal use*. Upgrade to Pro to unlock additional awesome features for animation and game development.
Commercial : $250 - For commercial organizations*

• Advanced onionskin mode for pro animation.
• Advanced Bone support with IK and constraints.
• Set up grids and load in background images to work over.
• Place unlimited, named “action points” per frame.
• Place unlimited, named collision rectangles per frame.
• Set up variables or tags for characters, with default values which can be triggered to change at any animation frame.  Attach these variables and tags to specific keyframes, sprites, animations, etc.
• Easily design “character maps” for visual variations of characters using extremely little extra data or time. (Ideal for characters getting new weapons, armor, etc).
• Merge multiple Spriter project files into a single file (great for working on large game projects with a team).
• Trigger and preview sound samples with volume control per frame.
• Quickly replace images or entire image folders in your animations.
• Create rotated version of frames.
• Automatically import sequential images as animations.
• Texture atlas (spritesheet) support via Code'n'Web TexturePacker integration.

* Pro users must upgrade to a Commercial license if you generate over $8000 on a project using Spriter

Larger businesses contact us about studio licensing.

Educational institutions please contact us about classroom licenses.

The pro and commercial licenses will be available to use in one of two flavors:

single user - multi seat
This is a cross-platform license intended for a use by a single user for personal or indie use, potentially on more than one machine. This means you can install it on your home Windows PC, and your MacBook Pro when you're on the go, or whatever combination of computers you happen to use.

single seat - multi user
Install on a single computer for use by one or more users at a development or animation studio. This license is meant to be installed on only one machine at a time for multiple users.

Spriter will begin being split off into free and pro versions in one of next 2 releases, and this price increase will take effect on December 15th. So this month and a half will be the last chance to get it at our low pre-order price. Tell all your friends and fellow developers and animators to get it while it's still at the alpha price. Also, as of now, the only version that is or has been available for sale on our site is pre-orders for the pro version. We will make the commercial license available once the price increase takes effect.

Change in 1st Party Plugin Policy

Originally our business model included selling plugins and api's for Spriter as one potential revenue stream. Third parties would still be allowed and encouraged to develop and even sell plugins, but if we made one ourselves or hired a third party to do so, this would be an 'official' plugin, which would be promoted and sold on our site. We were also going to provide an avenue for third parties to partner with us, and we would share profit with them, and promote the plugin on our site in exchange for a share of the profits.

On the surface it made sense, and doesn't sound like there's anything wrong with it: "Make the program, the art packs, and the plugins. Sell the program, the art packs, and the plugins." However, as time went on, and the community of developers grew, we realized that it wasn't the right thing to do. There were developers creating and sharing their source code, and we would be punishing developers who wanted to share their source code, by not giving them the same promotion as developers sharing profit with us. We also realized on a wider scale, it would be dividing the entire community up into the official plugin developers, and the other plugin developers, as if we're the gatekeepers for who's good enough to get exposure, and the determining factor is a willingness to share profit. When looked at this way, it was definitely not who we wanted to be at all.

What's best for developers, animators, gamers, and Brashmonkey, is regardless of whichever platform you develop for, on whatever OS, just as you'd expect to find support for common image formats, you would find support for SCML. Depending on the platform or engine, it may or may not be common for developers to charge for APIs, plugins, etc. This should be up to the developer(s) doing the work. All implementations should be as easy as possible to find for any developer who needs them, and if it's not already on that platform, it should be as easy as possible to create one.

While we are certain this is the right decision, there are 77 of you who pledged enough to be in on the Unity plugin alpha, and 39 of those pledged enough to get all future first party plugins. As of now there will only be two first party plugins, for Scirra Construct 2 and Construct Classic, and we'll get back to that in a minute. When last I checked, there were 2, and possibly 3 Unity implementations in the works, including a collaborative effort on Spriter's messageboard started by ThinkSquirrel for a free Unity API. Not only do we not want to interfere with this, but it also means that you will all have access to these plugins far sooner than we would have been able to develop ourselves or work out a contract with a 3rd party developer.

So, a Unity plugin is coming, as are many other plugins and api's for other engines, most of which you can find in the forums. Furthermore by making both Construct plugins for free, those backers would indeed be getting all future first party plugins. However, we're not trying to get off on a technicality, and as some backers pledged extra for these privileges we're going to start off by giving all those who pledged 99$ or higher the full commercial license, but if you're one of those backers, we'd also welcome feedback about what additional rewards you would like. (For example, an extension of daily build access after Spriter 1.0, etc)

As for why we're still making the Construct plugins. This isn't a question of favoritism, it just so happens that Edgar has created several plugins for Construct in the past, including betas that were already made for these plugins, before the Kickstarter even came about. In the original plan to sell 1st party plugins, these were going to be the only two we were going create in house as opposed to hire out to a third party. These plugins will function as additional example implementations for developers, as they will be free and open source upon completion. The Construct 2 plugin in particular is also part of a larger strategy by allowing us to demonstrate Spriter in realtime in a browser without needing to download anything. Eventually, we'd also like to use Construct 2 to create a no-plugin required realtime player so Spriter users could embed examples of their work to share on websites with fans or potential clients. We plan to also create less obvious realtime usage examples, like easy to create, but complex and impressive Spriter powered GUIs, or real-time motion comics. The Construct 2 plugin is currently in development along with the remaining features of Spriter, and will also aid in expanding the SCML documentation by giving me first-hand experience implementing loading and playback of engine-side SCML.

Of course it goes without saying that the last few features, and the road to full bug-free stability are our highest priority. Each new feature comes with potential new bugs. In one of the next few updates, all the basic 1.0 pro features will be implemented and full focus will be on stability, documentation, and polish. And finally, it's getting asked around alot, lately, so I'll say it here, our estimation for 1.0 is by the end of Dec 2012. Once Spriter 1.0 is complete and stable, we still have many more exciting features and enhancements we will add to Spriter, and we'll reveal more after 1.0 arrives.

We're nearing the home stretch for 1.0, and we can't thank you all enough for your continued support.

-Edgar and Mike @ BrashMonkey

A quick video explaining some of the new features in Spriter A4:

windows

linux

mac

Spriter A4.1 hotfix changelog:

• fixed a bug with keyframe rescaling where you could attempt to scale the first keyframe (which should always stay at time 0
• fixed a bug with reparenting and shifting sprites upon bone deletion in certain situations
• fixed a crash upon undo the deletion of a bone with remaining children

Scroll down to previous update for a4's epic changelog