*jaw drops to the floor*

wow* incredible! Did you used Blender or Spine for this?

maybe Spriter or something similar. In any case, it looks crazy. Nice job;)

Looks awesome! What software was it btw? I'm a linux guy and have a free open source project where I need to do things along these lines as well... https://AncientBeast.com

Regarding my project, going for animations exported from blender, using our Spritify addon

https://github.com/Fweeb/blender_spritify example here: https://AncientBeast.com/viewer

You should usually export the animations as sprite sheets as well btw, because that helps with compression a ton and also improves speed when importing stuff, especially for web based games, since less server requests are being done, which are somewhat slow overall.

Holy shit guy, that is epic stuff! Thanks for sharing, and under such a generous license.:)

Bumped into that software before, no linux version though sadly. Perhaps it might work with Wine or something...

Cool, go for the spritesheets, that's a total must. Also a folder with previews as gifs for all the animations would be a nice thing. It's good that you included a "Read Me" file with your Patreon link, you should also mention your OGA link in there, because people tend to download a lot of stuff and they don't know where they got it from or who made it by the time they get to make use of it xD

Regarding the dragon, I'm amazed that the head / tail have a 3d effect to it, which tbh I was only expecting that when exporting from 3d software, so I take it that in this software you made those from multiple sprites and the you managed the 3d effect by squashing parts and moving the ones behind, kind of like paralax effect? Usually avoided looking into 2d animation editors like that just because the animations would feel too flat overall :D

Oh and one more thing: Pretty much nobody uses animated sprites in separate files nowadas.

Also sprite sheets are quite redundant overall, see reasoning below!

The golden goose is to have animation from Dragon Bones exported as sprite sheet with the dragon parts and a JSON file with the animation data. That's the most optimized and reusable thing possible. For example I use Phaser-CE for me game and Dragon Bones can export to Pixi, which is the graphical rendering engine for it. This way I could customize the dragon itself and even add new animations or reuse animations between various characters. So you should provide the dragon sprite sheet in a folder along with animation JSON, plus export as Dragon Bones project format ideally, at least as a bonus thing for your Patreon, it would be the ultimate catch for getting new Patreons and making people happy ;-)

Those sprite sheets could be further optimized using a service like https://tinypng.com which really cuts off a lot of the size without quality compromises, you could optimize those yourself or offer a tip in the "Read Me".

More formats for convenience is nice, but game devs will probably have no trouble converting 2D animations into whatever format they require... uncompressed image sequence is the most general and sufficient format that can be further processed with ffmpeg, imagemagick etc., to suit the specific engine.

I also couldn't believe this wasn't "truly" 3D, especially after seeing the death animation iin which the dragon rotates completely 90 degrees towards the camera. But I've been told it's just a number of deformed layers. I don't know about any free SW that can easily and directly do this, but I think you could mimic this with Blender. For just "normal" 2D layered animation Blender or Synfig Studio are more than sufficient.

Indeed, I did more research and wwe talked in private quite a bit and came to the same conclusion.

Was just reading an artigle that Godot engine will reintegrate 2d atlases soon for example and there's also Texture Packer application.

I usually don't like this new new trend of mobile games as they all do fast 2d animations that make me cringe, since elements are always off and sliding around, creating an "uncanny" effect. But this dragon's animations quite good because of head/tail tip going sideways and the spikes of the body, creating dept properly. Anyway, I've just checked the death animation and besides some issue with the spikes from the back legs going through the body, this is mind blowing, making me very confused as it seems totally 3d... hmm... SW = software, yeah, I managed to download and install DragonBones on Linux, gave it a go, but yeah, talked about Blender/Synfig alternatives and perhaps even Godot and Tupi 2d at some point.

I really enjoyed Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but I think it used 3d prerendered creatures, not fully sure though. Seen some timelapse of the HD remake where the artist was just drawing on top of the old stuff, making 2d animation with sprite parts, but that could be perhaps because the team didn't had access to the old 3d models to simply render the stuff at higher resolution or something, dunno. Hopefully I'll eventually find out, I might ask in the community forum since there are plenty of modders around there.

OMG.....Thanks...!! i need this sprite