What is Spriter Spriter enables the “modular” method of animating where, instead of each frame being a single complete image, it is constructed from many small, re- useable images (such as body parts). Each of these images that are used to construct the full frame can be scaled and rotated to further increase the “mileage” an artist can get from them. This modular method of animating offers many benefits for several aspects of a game’s development and the final 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 power-ups and new equipment). (coming soon) 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. Spriter also offers a wonderfully natural and visual way of editing critical aspects of actual gameplay! Here’s how: Per frame, you’ll be able to trigger multiple sound samples (with volume control) in an animation. (coming soon) Per frame, you will be able to place and name an unlimited number of “action points”. Perfect for telling the game where to spawn bullets or anchor other sprites etc. (Pro version) (coming soon) Per frame, you will be able to place, name AND set an alpha or numeric value for an unlimited number of collision rectangles! (Pro version) (coming soon) All with ease and immediate visual or audio feedback within the editor. You will also be able to create an unlimited number of “variables” for any “character” (a character is a set of animations) and trigger the change of any variable at any frame of any animation! (Pro version) These features will allow for an incredibly easy and natural way of tweaking actual aspects of game-play within this easy-to-use and highly visual editing tool.

# Spriter Pro User’s Manual version 0.5

Quickstart
Sprites
Bones
Animating
Character Maps
Index