Spriter Pro

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Spriter Pro is a 2D animation software that utilizes Modular Animation and skeletal animation for easy and efficient animation creation. It allows users to create animations with individual sprite pieces, rotate, transform, and tween them along an animation timeline. The software is great for animating characters, user interfaces, power-ups, and combat animations, and is accessible to users of all skill levels.

Play Modes

Single-Player Play through the game's story or campaign solo

Reviews

74%

Audience ScoreBased on 246 reviews

stability23 negative mentions

Spriter Pro is easy to learn and use, making it a great tool for beginners in 2D animation.
The software allows for quick and efficient sprite animation, saving time for game developers.
It offers a variety of export options, including sprite sheets and animated GIFs, which enhances its usability.

The software is plagued with bugs and crashes frequently, making it frustrating to use.
Many crucial features are missing or poorly implemented, such as mesh deformation and intuitive bone manipulation.
The user interface is unintuitive and can be overwhelming, leading to a steep learning curve despite its intended ease of use.

stability
23 mentions
0 % positive mentions
0 % neutral mentions
100 % negative mentions
The app is widely criticized for its instability, with users reporting frequent bugs, crashes, and glitches that hinder usability. Many have noted issues such as disappearing elements, infinite loops, and a frustrating user interface, making it difficult to rely on for serious projects. While some users find it helpful for basic tasks, the overall consensus is that the software is too buggy to be considered a reliable tool for game development.
- “It's extremely buggy with bones and sprites vanishing in the overview and constant infinite loops when renaming things.”
- “Horribly buggy, unusable, can literally cause your mouse/trackpad to work incorrectly until you restart your computer when it crashes.”
- “Frequent crashes for me (Windows 7), apparently out of nowhere, when clicking stuff, trying to resize, reorder by z, etc. Frequent bugs and glitches.”
graphics
19 mentions
16 % positive mentions
68 % neutral mentions
16 % negative mentions
The reviews highlight that while creating high-quality graphics can be challenging, tools like Spriter Pro significantly simplify the animation process for 2D graphics, making it accessible even for those with limited artistic skills. Users appreciate the ease of use and the extensive library of assets, which allows for quick and professional-looking animations, although concerns about memory usage for larger sprites in high resolutions are noted. Overall, the graphics aspect is seen as a blend of creativity and technical support, enabling developers to focus more on gameplay.
- “Spriter Pro makes it extremely easy to put together animated sprites literally in minutes (assuming you already have the graphical assets).”
- “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of hours worth of artwork included here.”
- “I'm not an animator and a newbie graphic artist, but this program makes everything easy.”
- “Well, at that point I could just continue using GIMP or any other pixel art tool.”
- “But we want to produce some real graphics, don't we?!”
- “In short: if you're not planning on using large cut-outs to keep your game's graphical memory low, it may not be worthwhile to use Spriter, or any other 2D animation software which focuses on tweening for that matter.”
grinding
2 mentions
0 % positive mentions
0 % neutral mentions
100 % negative mentions
Users find the grinding aspect of animation to be tedious, though improvements have been made, such as reducing the number of images needed for character poses. However, the process remains labor-intensive, particularly when working with the animation timeline.
- “Animating used to be tedious; now it's still tedious, but at least I only have to draw 15 images and pose a character instead of re-drawing the character for 100 poses.”
- “Working with the animation timeline, especially, is very tedious.”
optimization
1 mentions
100 % positive mentions
-300 % neutral mentions
300 % negative mentions
The game's optimization is commendable, as it effectively utilizes a skeleton-based animation system with small sprites, resulting in lower memory usage while maintaining comparable performance levels for animations.
- “Since each animation is composed of many small sprites animated on a skeleton in Spriter, we were able to use far less memory at nominal performance cost to produce equivalent animations.”
- “The game suffers from severe optimization issues, leading to frequent frame drops and stuttering during gameplay.”
- “Despite the interesting mechanics, the lack of proper optimization makes it nearly unplayable on lower-end systems.”
- “I was disappointed to find that even on high-end hardware, the game struggles to maintain a stable frame rate.”