Recently a new kickstarter project called Spine was launched, this is a software which is specilized in 2D bone animations.
I’ve downloaded it and tried the functionalities built into this software. Compared to Spriter which is also a kickstarter project specilized in 2D animations, Spine is a lot better than what Spriter provides.
First of all, the interface of Spine is neat and clean, make it more like a professional software, and you can use the same bone animations for different skins which really simplify the creation of your game art.
Secondly, spine is really easy to use, I’ve tried most of the features without searching for any instructions. For some other features, I just go to the official forum and create a new topic, and then they reply me just in a few minutes.
However there are 2 things Spriter takes advantages, one is that spriter is a lot cheaper which is ($25 for pre-order), however Spine is 55$(30$ if you back their kickstarter project). Another one is that it seems like spriter has plugins which supports unity3d, construct2, AS3 which means it can export the animations for most of the popular game engines. However, spine right now only supports libgdx, but it did support png and some other image formats and also can export json. You can make your own plugin using json export.
I decide to wait for a while and see what Spine team going to do when their kickstarter project has exceeds their goal. If they are going to implement AS3 and other run times, then I will definitely buy it. Otherwise, I will consider a bit longer.
Be aware that Spine already comes with libgdx when you buy it for (currently) $45 on their website. The (already funded) Kickstarter will “merely” fund additional exporters for Unity and the likes.
Note: I’m not affiliated with Spine or libgdx in any way; just looking forward to using it for games